The Next Three Days: Breaking out is hard to do

Following a bafflingly superfluous teaser prelude, the first scene proper features two handsome couples of apparent privilege seated round a table in a nice Pittsburgh restaurant, getting into a heated—which is to say overcooked—debate about gender roles in the workplace. So, ostensibly serious theme now slapped down on the table, we already know we’re in a Paul Haggis movie, even if the theme’s not entirely obvious relevance to our story seems a surprisingly loose opener for the Crash (2004) writer/director’s typically hyperactive dramaturgy. What this scene tells us is that Lara Brennan’s a woman worth going the limit for, one both smart and amorous—her public cat fight gets her so aroused she leaps upon her husband as soon as they get to their car. Of course, her husband is Russell Crowe.

The following morning Lara finds blood on her coat. Four seconds later cops burst in and arrest her for a murder we just sort of presume she didn’t commit. Before you know it, Lara’s behind bars and all out of appeals, sentenced to life imprisonment with no chance of avoiding a very bad dye job. Now desperately spouseless and stuck with a morose six year old to raise alone, John Brennan’s only recourse is bust Lara out. He teaches literature at a community college, so there’s a scene where he lectures on Don Quixote, in case we didn’t catch on to the fact that he’s about a hatch a plan that’s positively quixotic!

The title of The Next Three Days reads like a fleet thriller, but it actually needs to cover about three years worth of story before those three days arise. That’s a lot to burn through, and the perhaps inevitable result is that each of its central characters, Lara and the little boy most especially, never emerge as anything more than ciphers, mere props in a complicated plot. This isn’t such a bad thing if the focus were to stay firmly on the action, but Haggis, working from a 2008 French movie called Pour elle, has to have it both ways, so we get scenes like the one where we first see John visit Lara in prison. I’m guessing that Haggis wanted to use the scene to strengthen our sense of the couple’s intimacy and John’s fathomless devotion—there’s not much of a movie here without it—yet their every exchange is almost comical in its slavishness to exposition. What we get is somberness without the satisfaction of emotional depth. What we get is a waste of Brian Dennehy in umpteen scenes where he does nothing but gaze portentously. The other thing we get is a thriller that’s 133 minutes long.

There’s a nice cameo from Liam Neeson and some clever twists. Things are most interesting when John’s forced to descend into Pittsburgh’s underworld to collect the necessary illegal items on his conscientious prison-break check list. He has dangerous run-ins with RZA, a deaf pessimist, and some really nasty dudes in a meth lab whose lives we’re to regard as expendable if their termination should facilitate Lara’s liberation. You sometimes wonder if there couldn’t be something in John’s totally insane adventure that might be fun, but that would be in the Tony Scott version, and we already got a new one from him last weekend.

Over the border and into the bathos

Crossing Over features a cross-section of characters figuratively situated on either side of the US border, people who either want in, want to stay, or want to determine who makes the cut. You’ve got your Mexican mom illegally cranking out textiles for a few bucks to fund a better life for her little boy. You’ve got your affluent Iranian family with its soon-to-be naturalized patriarch and daughter turned black sheep on account of assimilating too fully into the Western model of feminine independence. You’ve got your Chinese family, the parents humbly coveting citizenship while their punk kid scoffs at such a legit entrée into an American dream he’s figured is available only to the Tony Montanas of the world. You’ve got your naïve Islamic teen apologist for the 9/11 hijackers persecuted for exercising her freedom of speech. You’ve got just about everything you could think to throw into a movie about the overwhelming morass surrounding US immigration. Everything except a rounded character, a single plausible scene or even a coherent polemic.

Hopping around Los Angeles to follow several characters as they cross paths and slide into detours, Crossing Over is earnest as all hell, ostensibly muckraking, dramaturgically strangled, and deeply mawkish. In other words, it’s the new Crash—there’s even an actual car crash that brings together, wouldn’t you know it, someone trying to get a green card with someone who approves green cards! So lovely young would-be Aussie starlet Alice Eve winds up screwing shameless old bureaucrat Ray Liotta in a motel room, but at least she cries in the shower afterwards. Meanwhile senior migra Harrison Ford goes on a private crusade to protect an abandoned child and immigration lawyer Ashley Judd has to deal with aggressively moronic feds who go ballistic over militant Islamic chat rooms found on annoyingly self-righteous Summer Bishil’s computer. The pervading dumbness reaches its spectacular nadir in a convenience store robbery gone wrong where, after splattering three kids brains all over the walls, Cliff Curtis, in a scene he’s surely praying future-employers will soon forget, delivers a monologue about how becoming an American constituted the greatest moment of his life to a crybaby twit pressing a loaded gun into a terrified innocent’s woman’s skull. It’s so unintentionally funny it’s not even funny.

Writer/director Wayne Kramer (The Cooler), a South African who doubtlessly has some first-hand knowledge of the issue at hand, apparently wants to tell a story about the masks we wear and compromises we make to get by. Perhaps the fundamental problem with Crossing Over is that for so much of the film masks are about all we see. Despite the efforts of a few of the better actors, these characters are crude types, overwrought mouthpieces for a grossly over-calculated scheme. Nothing feels natural, so nothing resonates. Images of crying kids are milked to death. Bizarrely, given the context, the sex and violence feels gratuitous. Bishil’s one victimized facial expression grates. Good intentions only make the whole thing more frustrating to sit through. I’ll say this for Kramer: at least his ambitions are to provoke viewers to reconsider what it means to be a patriotic American. Still, you should see The Visitor instead.

Quantum of Solace: 007 breaks still further from the past, bonds with a new audience

Careening from car chase to interrogation-gone-horribly-awry, from a foot chase across the crumbling rooftops of Siena, while a horse race collapses into bloody chaos in the streets, to a perilous rope-dangling punch-up amidst scaffolding and broken glass, Quantum of Solace, picking up where Casino Royale left off, making it the first James Bond movie to benefit from continuum, hits the ground running, leaving you as breathless as this sentence. It has a vague, dumb-sounding name—taken, ornery Bondaholics note, directly from Ian Fleming—but is the antithesis of the flabby action spectacle that plagues so many multi-million dollar event movies. The second outing for this renovated, revitalized Bond, beautifully embodied in the battered physique and wounded near-menace of Daniel Craig, is the shortest, sharpest, and most devastating entry in the long-running franchise. The tale, courtesy of Paul Haggis and Bond veterans Neal Purvis and Robert Wade, that turns on cold-blooded comeuppance and the looming threat of impenetrable powers working to horde the world’s dwindling resources, is indeed very bleak Bond—but who ever told you bleak can’t be thrilling?

Casino Royale sought a Bond with psychological nuance, or rather, one with any recognizable psychology whatsoever, and Quantum of Solace follows up on the promise. Which doesn’t mean that the film is ponderousness or explanatory, on the contrary, Craig’s Bond is cagey as befits a killer superspy, his internal turmoil not entirely obscure to the camera—there’s a scene where a friend dies in his arms—but hardly an open book either. That he’s consumed by wrathful grief over the death of his lover Vesper Lynd is all you really need to know about the previous film and it’s in any case made abundantly clear in the telegraphic dialogue sequences. The revenge theme is actually doubled with the introduction of Camille (Olga Kurylenko), easily among the most developed Bond girls, whose determination to kill a Bolivian general planning a coup d’etat supported by the CIA and an international organization disguising itself as an environmentalist group nicely dovetails into Bond’s agenda. That this agenda is as driven by personal motives as professional duty is essential to the drama, and the balance between the two is as ambiguous to us as it is to Bond’s superior, M, played with minimalist flair and spooky containment by Judy Dench. She’ll have to cut him lose once things get too unruly for MI6 to sanction, but you sense that she’s always rooting for him with the same troubling faith in vigilante justice that Commissioner Gordon holds with regards to the Dark Knight.

Quantum of Solace was directed by Marc Forster, whose filmography includes Monster’s Ball, Finding Neverland, Stranger Than Fiction and The Kite Runner, none of which allude to an artist with a hidden urges to blow shit up. Yet I’d venture to say that this is the best thing Forster’s done, a project that utilizes his sensitivity to theme and tension and annexes his tendency toward bathos and emotional kitsch. It is a common complaint of critics, myself included, that most modern filmmakers can’t piece together a comprehensible action sequence, but the frenzy of close-ups, wide shots and collisions that cascade throughout Quantum of Solace remind us of the oppositional argument, that such action in real life is hardly tidy and easy to follow, that instincts overrule thought, that movies don’t always have to give us privileged points of view, that we too can get excited and unnerved by the wild blur of action escalating to a climax. There’s a kind of adrenalized poetry in this, and few can do it with the zest shown here by Forster, cutters Matt Chesse and Richard Pearson, and Dan Bradley, whose fights were incorporated into the similarly dizzying braid of imagery in the Bourne films.

Looking over the reviews thus far, I see a lot of gripes about straying from tradition: What about the gadgets and car fetish? What about the bon vivant Bond who never sweats? What about the silly villains and their pets? What about the zany candy coloured sets? What about the casual misogyny? Well, sorry, those days are gone. And there is no Santa. You’d think with the Bond closing in on nearly two-dozen films we’d welcome an overhaul. Admittedly, I’m no Bondophile, but perhaps the cult can content themselves with the massive back catalogue while the rest of us are entertained, provoked and shaken awake by this bold new direction.