Monday Morning Quarterback Part II
By BOP Staff
November 23, 2010
Edwin Davies: I think everyone is missing the bigger picture here. It's not that the plot is ridiculous, it's that the film seriously expects us to believe that someone who looks like Russell Crowe could get someone who looks like Elizabeth Banks.
The execution is all important with that plot because I saw the original French version (yes, The Next Three Days is a remake) Pour Elle (or Anything For Her, if you want to check it out in Netflix) last year and it was one of the best thrillers I have seen in a long time. It's almost as good as Tell No One, that other great modern French thriller, because it takes a thoroughly down-to-earth approach to a preposterous story, making the audience care about the characters enough to make us forget that the story is really silly. It also spends a lot of time showing how the husband would go about effecting an escape, spending months planning and planning and planning. The remake, on the other hand, is all about how Russell Crowe goes from mild-mannered schlub to Houdini in three easy steps, and that makes for a film which looks downright silly, especially when you consider the wealth of non-silly adult fare out there at the moment.
Seriously, though, everyone should check out Anything For Her. It's a really, really good film.
Reagen Sulewski: If I may take a swerve here, in my opinion, it's that it wasn't ridiculous enough. They needed to go full Law Abiding Citizen here just to create some mystery about how the hell they were going to pull this ridiculous premise off. We need spectacle now.
Max Braden: See, as ridiculous as the premise is for The Next Three Days, it doesn't seem much crazier to me than Unstoppable. (Seriously. One guy running on the back of a mile long train manually turning on brakes while the engine is still pulling at 70 mph with only five miles of track to disaster? Come on. Seriously??) And I think swapping Russell and Denzel, all else being the same, doesn't change the results that much. To me that just says Unstoppable had better timing, in part because it got there first.
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