HOLLYWOOD, Calif. — What would you do if the person you loved was suddenly arrested and taken from you, maybe forever? What if your only chance to pull your family’s life back from the brink was for you to try to pull off a potentially deadly crime with all-but-impossible odds of success? And if you did manage to succeed – then what?
These questions become heart-poundingly real in screenwriter/director Paul Haggis’s taut suspense thriller The Next Three Days. Haggis and his star, Russell Crowe, give audiences a thriller with the kind of hero not often seen in modern iterations of the genre: a keenly intelligent, methodical, but otherwise unremarkable man, whose actions are driven by desperation, determination and, above all, love.
Life seems perfect for John Brennan (Crowe) until his wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), is arrested for a murder she says she didn’t commit. Three years into her sentence, John is struggling to hold his family together, raising their son and teaching at college while he pursues every means available to prove her innocence. With the rejection of their final appeal, Lara becomes suicidal and John decides there is only one possible, bearable solution: to break his wife out of prison. Refusing to be deterred by impossible odds or his own inexperience, John devises an elaborate escape plot and plunges into a dangerous and unfamiliar world, ultimately risking everything for the woman he loves.
The Next Three Days also stars Brian Dennehy, Olivia Wilde and Liam Neeson.
