Movie review - The Next Three Days

The Next Three Days (2010) - A community college English professor decides to risk it all to break his wife our of prison.  She's been convicted of killing her boss but denies any guilt.  All the appeals have failed and she has attempted suicide he begins to plan a jail break.  The journey takes him to places he is utterly unprepared to survive.

This is a movie that I walked into prepared to love.  Shot in Pittsburgh with some incredible shots of my favorite city in the world.  Solid cast (Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Banks, Liam Neeson,  and a whole bunch of great supporting actors).  I can identify with a man who would do anything for the woman he loves.  This should be a movie that absolutely connects with me.

And somehow it never does.

The movie drops you into the middle of the action then bounces around for a while before settling into a linear groove.   The problem is that it's not quite clear what's going on at first (I assumed that the wife had killed her obnoxious sister in law at first rather than her boss) and you never really come to care about the characters. Curiously, the characters never seem to connect with each other either.  The husband/wife, mother/child, grownup child/adult parent, even the relationship with another parent, none of them feels connected, none of them make any sense.  Characters pop in and out at seemingly random points. The story wanders through the first half of the movie then picks up speed at a weird lurching tempo in the second half.

In the end a story that should have come together into a really nice adventure turns into something that just misses.

Rating - *** Worth A Look