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koberulz.bsky.social · @koberulz.bsky.social@bridge.neodb.net

Rated The Next Three Days 3/10

Sometimes all you need is a good plot idea and solid execution. The Next Three Days has the former, and patches of the latter, but it insists on dressing it up with so many other elements for the sake of additional twists and turns that it ends up sucking a lot of the life out of it. There's a mid-point reveal that comes out of nowhere, and affects nothing, with a post-climax epiphany occurring for no reason other than to walk back that reveal. The setup, on the other hand, is whisked through so quickly it took me far too long to come to grips with what was going on. A group of people are out for dinner. They go home. One of the women discovers blood on her coat the next morning, just as the cops burst in and arrest her for murder. She has an alibi, she says. The dinner, obviously. A few days later, her husband visits her in prison, at which point it becomes clear that the murder was actually committed after the dinner, not during it, that something that happened at the dinner was supposedly motive, and that she's exhausted all her appeals because she's actually been in prison for years, not days. It's a very awkward start, but it settles in once the husband (Russell Crowe, L.A. Confidential) decides the only reasonable course of action is to break his wife (Elizabeth Banks, Man on a Ledge) out of prison, which he sets about doing incredibly methodically and with great care. He's clearly very smart, but not smart enough to realise Nicole (Olivia Wilde, The Words), the mother of one of his son's friends, is hitting on him. I love a well-planned and well-executed scheme, and once the prison break kicks in the film delivers on that in spades, but if it could just drop some of the goings-on around it the result would be a better film than the one that exists.

#movie

Published 2026-06-21 00:00 UTC · bridged from Atmosphere