Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Rating: 6 Escape Maps

After his wife is wrongfully accused of murder and sent to jail, a desperate husband hatches a plan to spring her and go on the run with their young son.

The title is actually seriously misleading, the timeline goes through 3 sets of threes, not just days: three years since the wife was arrested, three months since she tried to kill herself, and then the three days before the wife is to be transferred to a real prison and he attempts to help her escape. Which, more or less, sums up the entire movie right there, that’s kind of sad. Russell Crowe certainly did a better job as the desperate and dangerous father, than say Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness, but that isn’t necessarily saying much. You could’ve stuck a few dozen other big name action hero actors into this very same role and the end result would be more or less the same, nothing about the movie is terribly original.

So we have Russell Crowe as John Brennan, the schoolteacher turned potential criminal. His character keeps making mistakes because he just doesn’t know any better: getting rolled by the fake passport and paper people, beaten and robbed, and generally mistreated until he finds a better way of dealing with these punks. Elizabeth Banks stars as the wife Lara, and she does a fair job of keeping things interesting. Liam Neeson gets a sadly short cameo as the only man to escape from the prison where Lara is being held, and gives a talk on what one needs to have in order to break another person out of jail. And Jason Beghe stars as one of the cops hunting the fleeing married couple!

It’s not really worth the outrageous theater prices these days, honestly. The film is interesting enough to keep one’s attention for an afternoon of tv watching, but that’s about it. Not enough realism, too much adherence to one thing and not another, does not make for a truly riveting movie-going experience. The Next Three Days gets a score of 6 escape maps!