Monday, 23 July 2012

DVD review: The next three days


The husband of a girl accused of murder is prepared to do anything for her, including evading her from prison.

Much maligned on the release this surprisingly good movie feature the best Russel Crowe performance of quite some time. The whole point of the movie is to take a typical Hollywood situation, a prison break, and put a normal person, a college professor, in the main action role. The results are both unusual, our hero never become a gun toting Bruce Willis style guy, he spends most of the running time preparing and rehearsing, and gripping, our hero makes so many mistakes and he is so obviously not very confident in his role that there is a clear sense that anything could go wrong.
Crowe is perfect as the ordinary man with a steely resolve; he is still one of the best in the business. For very peculiar reasons, mainly his bad temper, it is fashionable to bash him, but to judge an actor from his off screen antics is really, very stupid.
The movie in itself is not perfect. The last bit, the actual prison break, is very good and engaging but it takes forever to get there and, Crowe performance notwithstanding is too slow and little bit boring. There is an interesting angle about the Wife, Elisabeth Banks, where we are forced to ponder the very real possibility that she really did kill her boss. This neatly augments the main theme of the movie.
A nice dramatic movie, recommended to fans of the genre.

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