The Next Three Days
Next Three Days plays the partition For Her, Panting little French thriller. But Russell Crowe is not Vincent Lindon, Elizabeth Banks not Diane Kruger and Paul Haggis Cavaye not Fred.
Little flashback. It’s 2008 and the pleasant surprise of the French cinema comes from a young director, Fred Cavaye, which for its first test succeeds thriller tense, nervous, excited, breathless. The film is called For Her Vincent Lindon and excelled in the husband desperate to leave his wife (Diane Kruger, convincing) in prison. The kind of little film well done and effective that attracts attention. Two years later, it does not fail, that is the American remake of the thing.
So we thought of fashion a bit stale remakes – and they rejoiced, let’s be honest – that’s the Hollywood studios come out with a shovel. Swedish Let the Right One In, For Her now and soon Anthony Zimmer (Now The Tourist), To name a few, then go through the mill of imitation to come out, hopefully it among studio executives, more suited to the taste of the American public, so global.
But a bit like Chinese food loses its flavor once it crosses its borders, we are confronted with works that are still does not really exist. For Her since it was from him that it had everything we needed the right places to work wonders. In its U.S. version, this is the insipid suspense, tension and effete French cultural exception passed through a grinder of a vision without soul and without tone. The Oscar-winning Paul Haggis (Crash), We frankly expected more.
For in the transfer over the Atlantic, the bird has lost some feathers. Or rather, he has added so as not to fly only with difficulty. Abuse of namby-pamby music mash-contaminating each scene, editing lacking coherence, suspense underscored by a camera artificially nervous end to endless finish, affording even a few detours through ridicule, overall lack of sincerity: the After the match France / United States no doubt.
But it’s even more to the casting of the remake that the shoe gets seriously hurt. For where Vincent Lindon assumed this character to the end of his shoulders hunched and his massive body to give it that extra humanity that made him want to follow him to the end of the world, where the actor was the French love the engine of his fiendishly clever plan without paying a single moment of sheer lunacy corny, Russell Crowe … Russell Crowe makes. Eyelid drooping, eyes off, the solid pace, the actor is content to rely on his (real) charisma to get the pill. In other roles, it would have sufficed. Here singularly lacking finesse.
Same conclusion also for his female counterpart, with whom the spark of chemistry does not really turn. Very very comfortable when it comes to comedy, so that one expects constantly, even after a prisoner at the crack of seeing one of his charming smiles, Elizabeth Banks never manages to give Laura’s the depth to be endearing (Note to director: Do not make him wear makeup does not make serious).
