The Next Three Days is a complicated movie to review. When I first walked out of the theater, my impression of it was that it was a mediocre American version of what would have been a great French film (it was adapted from an actual french film, but I have not seen the original version) . There are things about The Next Three Days that are great. There are things about it that are bad. After thinking about it for a couple weeks, I decided that I actually liked it quite a bit, and might even watch it again sometime. With the benefit of time, the good things definitely outweighed the bad. Its problem turns out to be that it lacks certain key qualities that would have taken the good, interesting story and made it timeless. But it is still a good, interesting movie.

What the film gets right is exactly what everyone is complaining about: that it is “slow”. Well, true, but that slow, deliberate quality also gives the film a certain depth that the vast majority of action-dramas do not have. It lets the viewer take in the magnitude of what the guy is doing. When the escape actually happens, it is tense, believable, and consistently surprising, and you have a connection to the events by virtue of having seen how long it took to put together, and the level of sacrifice the guy had to make to pull it off. Could they have done a better job portraying this? Yes. But all the same, I think they did pretty well.

Russell Crowe is very good as the weird, tortured husband, and it is fascinating and rather painful to watch him make his various attempts to set up his plan. The scene with Liam Neeson doing his Taken-style monologue is fantastic. (This monologue is the reason I went to the movie – it totally makes the whole preview.) Elizabeth Banks is great to look at, and does a good solid job as the wife. The supporting casting and the incidental casting are iffy, but somehow it does not seriously detract most of the time. The star here is Crowe, and he definitely delivers.

So what does not work in this film? Well for one the music is GOD AWFUL, and I have a tough time getting past that fact. Not only does the music suck, but it sounds like it was recorded on a fucking boom box! If this film made one change, and that one change was to give it a decent score / soundtrack, that alone might actually have gone a good way toward smoothing over the film’s other problems, which are inconsistent pacing and  inadequate exploration of the main character’s emotions. It would not, on the other hand, solve the problem that the casting and writing for the cop characters are both bad, and it would not solve the terrible, gutless, cringe-worthy epilogue with the two cops that both made no sense whatsoever and destroyed the delicious ambiguity of the husband’s motivation.

Still, I don’t care what the critics say. This film is a lot more interesting, exciting, and enjoyable than the vast majority of the crappy action dramas that are out there. It’s worth seeing, in my opinion.