Review: The Next Three Days

Paul Haggis’ prison break thriller delivers a great final act but fails to make us care about the characters at all in the film’s preceding two acts essentially neutering the emotional impact of the film.

The film is finely acted, has a very intriguing premise in the reverse jail break, and is pretty clever in it’s progression of the escape plot.  What doesn’t work is little to no characterization, characters doing things completely out of the blue with no validation, and a perplexing handling of the “did she do it” portion of the plot.

Speaking of the plot, it revolves around a young family that is torn apart when the mother, Lara, is abruptly arrested for the murder of a colleague she had recently a large argument with in the workplace.  After the appeals process runs out, her husband, John, abruptly decides to break her out of prison.  He tracks down an escape artist out of the blue and this sets in motion the steps he begins to take to try and free Lara from prison.

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Suggestion Box (Aug. 16 – 22)

This weeks we’ve got videos for films (Case 39 and The Next Three Days), video games (Brink, Epic Mickey, Dragon Age 2, and Halo: Reach), and a hilarious video from Funny or Die promoting Piranha 3D for the Oscars.  Check them out below:

Movies:

Case 39 Trailer - A horror film in which a little girl is taken in by a social worker (renee Zewhen she discovers that her parents are trying to kill her.  In actuality the danger goes much deeper than deranged parents when supernatural events start occurring to those around the little girl.  Hopefully it is just something clinging to her and not a hidden evil residing within the girl because even if her hair has the strong potential to be styled like the girl from The Ring, I have had enough of that.

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