Deciding to watch The Next Three Days took longer than actually watching the film. Paul Haggis might be one of the most polemic directors today in terms of story and content. He doesn’t necessarily cause controversy – unless it’s among critics – but, sort of like Clint Eastwood, he turns out films that are either rather solid or rather awful.
Take for instance some recent upsides in Haggis’ filmography: Casino Royale, Letter from Iwo Jima, In the Valley of Elah, and Million Dollar Baby. On the other hand, he also gave us Quantum of Solace, Flags of our Fathers, and Crash. I acknowledge that Crash won the Oscar for Best Picture; however, the victory was a superficial way to atone for white guilt much more than it was based on merit.
That said, there are elements in The Next Three Days that make it vintage Haggis, most notably some exaggerated scenes to really drive home emotion and a logic-defying twists or turns to create tension and conflict. However, in the grand scope of the film, these are rather venial sins inasmuch as The Next Three Days is crime-thriller that focuses less on the crime at hand and more on planning the crime to come.
Within the first ten minutes of the film, Lara Brennan (Elizabeth Banks) is arrested at her home in the early morning while her son and husband John (Russell Crowe) look on in shock. Charged with bludgeoning her boss with a fire extinguisher in a parking garage, Lara goes to trial, is sentenced to prison for twenty-odd years, and files a number of appeals. This all occurs off-screen, which is one of the blessings of this film: the often-overly-dramatized antics of the court room with the indifferent judge and villainous prosecutor is elided, as is an abject denouncement of her guilt. Instead, the audience doesn’t know whether Lara committed the crime for ninety percent of the film, and, in a way, the film would have been even better had the audience never learned the truth, but that can be tackled a bit later.
The genius here is that – instead of the audience sympathizing with Lara’s plight or denouncing her for her crime – the focus shifts to John’s determined passion to break his wife out of prison after their last appeal is denied. Here, Haggis sets up a truth via the husband, a man who, regardless of his wife’s guilt or innocence, could never accept that she has done something so heinous. In turn, our attention turns to John, and we’re forced to decide whether – if we were in his shoes – we would go to such lengths to spring the person we love.
To Haggis’ credit, these lengths are also an upside to The Next Three Days. Most of them are logical, and John doesn’t succeed instantaneously; there is a learning curve to breaking someone out of prison. There is trial and error. There are repercussions. And, most importantly, decisions need to be made and risks need to be taken. John isn’t a safe-cracking genius or gadget wizard like some of Ocean’s eleven – but he’s not meant to be, which makes this heist film more realistically unnerving and less a fun ride to partake in. Instead, he’s a community college professor.
What’s doubly clever about this film is that – unlike some of Haggis’ previous – it tackles a number of themes as opposed to settling on one, like racism or euthanasia. One at the forefront is “technology” and how it both increases our awareness and knowledge while simultaneously creating an illusory “truth.” In other words, John teaches literature, but he also learns to make a “bump key” and break into cars with a tennis ball thanks to YouTube or another Googled link on the Internet. In this film, and in reality, the Internet has made information more accessible, so the layman is no longer completely intimidated by security systems and the dead bolt lock.
Ironically, this same technology is flawed in that the images are consumed as truth, even if the blips between information is foggy or missing, something that’s clear in the case of Lara’s conviction and subsequent arrest: video footage catches portions of the narrative that leads to the crime, but not the crime itself. Her verbal altercation with her boss is caught on tape in the office, she is seen walking toward the garage shortly after her boss, and she is seen leaving shortly after the time of death. After the third appeal is denied, even her attorney pleads with John to “look at the evidence.” She might not be guilty, but the surveillance evidence is often seen as infallible. In other words, The Next Three Days suggests that we’ve become so used to taking video evidence as “truth” that reasonable doubt has taken a back seat.
In turn, if technology has become problematic in distinguishing between truth and assumption, then this issue becomes doubly nefarious when dealing with the legal system and capital punishment. Now, Lara is never openly sentenced to death, but once her appeal is denied, she’s on the list to be transferred, which could very well suggest she’s heading to death row. Regardless, The Next Three Days further suggests that our faith in technology over thorough investigation could very well lead to a number of wrongly imprisoned people – if not wrongly executed, something that’s been a bit of an issue lately when considering the recent fate of Troy Davis.
All in all, The Next Three Days succeeds in forcing us to question our reliance on technology, our potential views on the justice system, capital punishment, and how safe we should feel in a world tethered to social networks and ubiquitous surveillance. There’s also a tiny voice in the back of my head making me wonder how a turkey gets celebratorily pardoned each Thanksgiving, but Davis did not.
