The Next Three Days (2010)

Paul Haggis built his 2010 thriller The Next Three Days from a French original, Pour elle, and he kept the machinery intact: a Pittsburgh community college instructor named John Brennan watches his wife Lara take a life sentence for a murder she insists she did not commit, exhausts the appeals process, and then spends three months learning to break her out of Allegheny County Jail. The film is a procedural of escalating competence, a man buying fake passports, testing bump keys, setting fire to a meth lab. It is also, by the standards of its decade, an unusually quiet piece of work. There is nothing in it to argue with, and nothing in it to argue about.

The supporting cast deserves a moment of professional attention. Aisha Hinds appears as a detective, competent and unremarked upon, her race never raised as a subject. A deaf motorcyclist sells John forged documents in a bar, and his deafness functions as a plot detail, a reason he operates outside the usual channels. Olivia Wilde drifts through a brief scene as a mother offering unsolicited advice. None of these presences carry a thesis. The film has no interest in the arrangements of power it depicts, no interest in the prison system as an institution, no interest in the wife as anything but a woman to be retrieved. Elizabeth Banks plays her with genuine desperation, and the screenplay gives that desperation nowhere to go.

The only ideology on offer is the one Haggis has described in interviews: Don Quixote, the romantic who ruins himself for an idea. John is an English teacher, and the film treats his self-destruction as an inheritance from literature, not politics. The result is a competent, slightly overlong suspense picture that opened at fifth place and vanished on schedule. As an object of cultural classification it is a blank page, and the honest verdict is that there is nothing here to grade. Some vintages are simply table wine. We note the year, we note the region, and we move on.