Considering The Next Three Days

The question of responding to injustice is a difficult one.  Injustice should anger us, and drive us to correct it if possible.  We are made in the image of a just God after all.  But sometimes Lady Justice is not only blind, but also deaf to our pleas.

On the Run

This is the set up for The Next Three Days (a remake of a French film) starring Russell Crowe.  In the interviews for the release of the movie, Crowe says he viewed this as more of a love story than an action film.  He plays John Brennan, an English professor.  The movie opens with him driving a car down the street with blood splattered on his face.  You can hear a man dying in the background.  You are confused.  “The Past Three Years” comes up on the screen, you are now going to find out how he found himself in this situation and how unlikely it was in the first place.

The first 15 minutes or so are confusing.  He and his wife have dinner with his brother and his wife.  It doesn’t go well.  Something is bothering Lara Brennan.  She apparently had an argument with her boss, and is now arguing about it with her sister-in-law.  The next morning the family is in their little ritual when she realizes there is blood on her coat.  As she’s trying to wash it off, the police show up to arrest her for the murder of her boss.  We don’t see the trial, only his visit to her in jail after another failed appeal.  Lots of things have been cut out.

After she attempts suicide, he realizes he must get her out of there.  Since he can’t do it legally, he will resort to doing it illegally.  This is what happens when we don’t believe in a just God or the Savior who suffered unjustly.  We are unable to suffer injustice as He did.  We deceive ourselves into thinking that the second wrong will make the first right.  But it really just complicates things, as John Brennan is about to learn.

He meets with a man who escaped from prison 7 times (played by Liam Neeson).  It is a chilling discussion.  He describes the kind of person you must be to pull it off.  You must not care about anyone or anything.  If you can’t be that person, don’t even try.  But why, John asks, did you give yourself up?  He couldn’t take wondering if tonight was the night they’d come for him.

Planning the Escape

John, without Lara’s knowledge, begins to plan an escape.  To free his wife, he will become a criminal.  The plot is thickened with her status becomes ambiguous.  She confesses that she did it.  He still believes she did not, and acts on it.  But he could be setting a killer free.  As the story unfolds, you are dragged into a deeper moral complexity.  He decides that he and his son cannot live without her, and that she will not live out her sentence.  As he discusses The Man of La Macha in class, you realize he’s fighting windmills too.

Then comes the fateful day that she will be transferred from Country Jail to prison in 3 days (hence the title).  His timing is thrown off, and he suddenly needs lots of money fast.  He faces more moral quandaries.  It is not so much a question of whether or not to commit a crime, but which crime to commit.  He ends up deciding he’ll rob criminals.  In a gripping scene, John crosses about 5 lines.  Soon he will be a wanted man even if he doesn’t break his wife out of prison.

The very next day he initiates his plan to free his wife and get his family out of the country.  In the process we find that he is more saavy than we thought.  The police are not bumpkins, but he stays one step ahead.

"13" as an unwitting accomplice.

The movie moves slowly for the first hour and picks up steam in the second hour.  This is not your typical Russell Crowe character.  His wife’s imprisonment destroys him.  He’s not self-assured; nor an experienced fighter.  He’s an ordinary guy in an extraordinary situation.  This is probably his best acting job since Cinderella Man.  The director does a good job of bringing you into the moral ambiguity and confusion upon which the plot is built.  His choices seem nearly reasonable in their context.  But regardless of whether or not his wife is innocent or guilty, he becomes a criminal in the process.  He who was without ‘sin’ becomes a sinner to set someone without ‘sin’ free.  Things are turned upside down.  But that is what happens when injustice prevails.