The Next Three Days and The Shankshaw Redemption

                The Next Three Days, directed by Paul Haggis, and The Shawshank Redemption, directed by Frank Darabont, were two movies that showed the imprisonment of innocent people and the drive to escape their forced destiny. The Next Three Days is about a woman name Lara who is charged for the murder of her boss. John is convinced that she is innocent but all evidence point to Lara being guilty. John becomes desperate to release his innocent wife from jail but he couldn’t appeal her case. So he finds and plans an escape for his wife from jail. In The Shawshank Redemption, is very similar to The Next Three Days, because it also deals with an innocent man named Andy Dufresne who has been found guilty of murdering his cheating ex-wife.  Andy becomes good friends with an inmate named Red, who helps Andy get through the hardships of prison life. Although Andy is innocent and can prove it, he still kept in the prison to be a personal assistant to the warden of the prison. What nobody knew was that Andy had been planning an escape for 20 years.  

                Both movies have mistrials given to each person who is innocent but who have great evidence against them. Another similarity I found was that they both dealt with the escape of both, although the motives were different. In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy drives himself to the point of insane desperateness of escaping the prison and is given through the point of view through Red his good friend. In The Next Three Days it is not Lara who plans her escape but rather her husband. Another difference I saw was the incentives for breaking out of jail. John and Lara had the need to be with each other and to form the family again. As for Andy, it was a sense of escaping his life altogether and finding a new peaceful life, one he didn’t have even before he went to jail. 

The Next Three Days

                The Next Three Days directed by Paul Haggis, is a story about a man named John Brennan, played by Russell Crowe, who sees his wife Lara Brennan, played by Elizabeth Banks, getting arrested for murdering her boss.  She pleads innocent but all evidence points to her being convicted of the murder and she ends up with sentence of jail for 20 years. For the past couple of years John was fighting for his wife’s freedom, but gives up trying to appeal her case. So he starts to research alternative solutions to bring his wife back to him and his child. That is when John runs into a book about a biography of Damon Pennington, played by Liam Neeson, who has escaped prison multiple times. John quickly gets a hold of Damon and he explains to John how he did it and how the system works for it an escape plan to actually work. John quickly plans for his wife’s escape but finds a lot of trouble in between.

                The Next Three Days was not all that I expected it to be. It was really awful. The plot was the main thing that I think they could have changed a lot. It was very boring at the beginning. It took about an hour for the movie to pick up speed.  I didn’t enjoy sitting and watching someone completely figure out their plan for an hour. Paul Haggis, the director, could have cut a lot of useless scenes that didn’t add to the story. For example, the scene where John got beaten up at the bar by the drug dealer was very unnecessary. That drug dealer never showed up again in the whole entire movie. Although it help the scene very little because John does run into the passport dealer, but it could have been done when they were dealing drugs on the street. Then the passport dealer could have then followed him home and that would have made it short, simple and to the point.  Another example of a useless scene was when John tried to rob the bank but then decides not to. It really did not add to the plot of the story. I can understand that it was put there to build tension of his desperateness of getting the money but by that point I had already gotten how quickly and desperately he needed it.  Also the woman and child screaming had no point either and the movie would still have made sense without it. Simple shots of the money being calculated on the map, how he turned to selling his belongings or even stealing from a meth dealer did a great job showing that. That alone gave the idea he was in major need of cash fast.

The audience doesn’t need to be slapped on the face with how desperately crazy John is. It was not too good of a movie but it did have some decent scenes and the ending half was the better part of this film. The action sequence was very good and the suspense did become very engaging but it could have used that same energy towards the beginning of the film.