Film Review: The Next Three Days 2010

By
manwomanmyth
– June 27, 2011      Comments: 23Posted in: Reviews

N.B. Film and TV reviews on this site are limited to identifying and analysing the degree of misandry and Feminist ideology they contain. They are not full reviews of plot, content and quality as are found elsewhere.

Man-Friendly?

 ★★★★★★★ 

Make no mistake, there are the green shoots of change in the movie industry as regards the portrayal of criminals and, more importantly, the portrayal of men.

It’s not yet anywhere near a level where I could breath a sigh of relief and think: “my work here is done” and quit the whole spot-the-misandry-in-film vocation, but I’m glad of it none-the-less.

In brief, The Next Thee Days is about an innocent woman sent to prison for murder whilst the real killer – another woman – is never caught nor even suspected. The husband of the falsely imprisoned woman breaks her out of jail and successfully flees the country with her and their young son.

The first thing that struck me about this film is how overwhelmingly positive it is about men in a number of ways.

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1) Firstly, in this film, men are shown to be how they generally are: basically good or at least existing within normal bounds of behaviour. I can’t stress how unusual this is and how important: men tend to be aberrant in some way in the majority of films.

The cops are generally either plain competent or else very astute. The minor male characters average. Even the criminal men are not presented as somehow evil personified. By this, I mean that we are not coached by this film into expecting the men we come across to be bad, evil, stupid or generally the bad-guys. I particularly liked the deaf-biker-criminal-guy who gets fake id for Crowe. He is shown to be intelligent and perceptive in a way that is not generally done for Hollywood bad guys. It’s not necessary to credit him with a brain in this way but it was done anyway. Unreal.

In fact, the film goes out of it’s way to portray a female detective as unnecessarily arsey and narky like she is always having a bad day. This kind of thing simply doesn’t happen in Hollywood films, at least not without male characters behaving a lot worse. This is plain weird. It may be the films French origins, but whatever it is, it’s refreshing and very well done.

2) Secondly, all evil does not rest at the feet of men.

To take an example, the murder is committed by a woman, presumed by her appearance to be homeless or similar. But the film shows that she is never seen committing the crime. What this means is that it didn’t need to be a woman perpetrator it could have been a man without altering any of the narrative. But it wasn’t presented this way. A woman is shown to be the perp.

It is phenomenally rare for an incidental evil character to be a woman in this way. I can’t actually think of a similar case where the writers had the option to insert an “evil-man” back story into the plot and chose instead to use a woman. It is essentially unheard of for a Hollywood film to not automatically portray a man as the perpetrator of something bad particularly when its not central to the plot. It is the unwritten rule in Hollywood that every sad back story be about an evil man it at all possible. Well, this film breaks that rule.

It could be argued that it fits better to use a female killer even though the crime was never witnessed and it helps with the audience reaction and acceptance of the piss-poor luck of the falsely convicted heroine, but I think this means something nevertheless.

3) Thirdly, the star is an ordinary man, not Jason Bourne reinvented. He is not emotionless and unaffected by pain and loss.

Personally, I think most ordinary men are extraordinary in their own ways and this film just presents it in an obvious way, movie-style. He is an honest and loving man who supports his wife no matter what and is shown to be faithful even in the face of (unfeasibly) hot competition for his affection in the shape of a single mother played by Olivia Wilde (who are virtually always bad news).

He doesn’t need to do the things he does for a chance at happiness. Rather he chooses to go against the odds for what he wants and believes for his family. I like the way the noble bloody-mindedness of ordinary men is captured by Crowe’s character.

The female characters are not superwomen, do not put the men around them down or put them to shame. There are no unlikely female characters to out-tough the men or out-think the men as seems de rigueur in recent decades. The fact is, the Feminist narrative seems to have not gotten a look-in with this film. It’s as if the film was somehow missed by the Feminist re-writers who didn’t get their chance to insert the standard child abuser character, an abusive father, a wife-beater and a improbably tough female police lieutenant (no doubt passed over for promotion because of her vagina) who never misses a chance to out-do her deficient male colleagues.

It’s all absent and not a single one of my misandry alarm bells were ringing during any part of this film. And in case you’re wondering, I have about a dozen such alarms, all finely tuned and at least one of them rings during any Hollywood film. Always. Well, except with this film. The alarms were alarmingly silent.

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So, I went looking for some issues.

For example the entire film is about a man’s love for a woman. He is willing to risk everything, including his and his son’s life for the love of a woman. I particularly loathe films where the be-all-and-end-all is the love for the girl, fighting for the girl, risking life-and-limb for the girl, etc.

Well, on the surface, this film may appear similar, but that’s not how it plays out. It’s not so much about her, it’s about what he thinks is important and right. I get the impression that this character would have done the same for a brother or sister or his son or perhaps even a friend. It is all about her (indeed the original is called Pour Elle, “Anything for Her”) but it’s quite clear that the fact that she’s a woman is almost incidental to the film. It’s not about a man risking everything because she’s a woman and her love is is everything to him and his life means nothing without her. Rather, it’s about a man doing what he decides to do for someone important to him and his life. He’s a family man who means to have his family back.

Another issue I shook a round a little, was that while he was prepared to leave his son behind and make a break for it with only his wife, she wasn’t and tries to kill herself rather than leave him behind (incidentally, this was her second attempt at suicide in the film).

Whilst this might appear to suggest that she cares for her son more than him, that’s not how it comes over. When he says he will find a way to get the boy to them when he can, we believe him. There is no sense of talk for talk’s sake, we know he would do what he says he’d do. Her attempt at suicide merely plays out as despair and failure to see the possibilities. She just sees dead ends whilst he (and we) see possibilities. In other words, even this behaviour by him – the decision to effectively abandon his son, at least temporarily – is not smeared and seasoned with misandry as would be the case in virtually any other film. Extraordinary.

I then looked at the one issue that may qualify as misandry. When the detectives are trying to trace Crowe’s car, they come up with two matches, one being his wife (as the convicted killer) and the other being a male rapist. Now, of course, rape can happen and a particular rapist may drive a Toyota Prius as presented in the film. However, I am always struck at how incidental crimes and criminal characters are too often rapists, child molesters and wife beaters. The criminal could have been in the system for a large number of crimes unrelated to sex crimes or domestic violence, but as usual, he has to be a rapist.

However, this is a little tenuous when analysing misandry in this film because it exists in such isolation. The original film, Pour Elle, has the criminal down as a child abuser, so perhaps rapist is an improvement.

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Even the men that are killed (there’s always a man or two or three killed, right?) are not killed in typical Hollywood manner. The drug dealer is shot by our hero, but not casually. Another dealer dies despite his efforts to try and save him. And of course, a woman is killed, which is central to the plot (did I mention that she was killed by another woman? And that it didn’t need to be a woman killer? I still don’t quite believe it…).

This film is a proper 4 leaf clover and I cannot say how encouraging it is that such a film could even exist.

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