Your first thought when living in New York City surrounded by the buzz of the Academy season… “Where did this film come from?” Wow, wow and wow! From director Paul Haggis, this is his closest to his Oscar-winner Crash capturing us in the first three minutes the way, well, Crash did. In this case it’s interlacing moments as opposed to interlacing plots, in a ticking clock of creative back/forth of events from past to present and back to past again until they all hook up. Hoping this gem-of-a-film doesn’t get lost in the holiday shuffle and ends up becoming this season’s Body of Lies, Russell Crowe is back as the sexy, temper-fired, explosive sex god we used to love before he got grey and fat (in a lot of his recent films.) In this, a remake of the French thriller Anything For Her, Russell Crowe plays John Brennan, a college professor at a local community college with a small son. And he drives a Prius. He’s an honorable guy and he’s madly in love with his beautiful wife, Lara Brennan (Elizabeth Banks) who’s been framed for murder. (It’s just too bad that plot point has to be disclosed by every magazine critic because part of the movie’s momentum; it’s immediate and immersing seduction, is the startling revelation of her character’s situation.) Anyway, the movie focuses on Crowe, the underdog single father, who desperately stops at nothing in order to get her off a life-sentence hook. A crime fyi…we aren’t sure she committed. According to the story, in the last thirty years the Supreme Court has not had a murder appeal, nor has anybody ever escaped the Pittsburgh Allegheny County Jail, without being shot dead. When our story opens, it begins on “The last three years” and then moves to the “last three months” and finally to the pulsing, intense, heart-stopping, “last three minutes.”The film has it all from a diabetic wife to passport forgery, to lock picking, gun slinging, igniting fires, medical tampering, driving reckless, druglords and robberies. Did I leave anything out? Oh yes… it has Brian Dennehy who plays Crowe’s father, minimal on dialog but hardy on emotional performance. No words are needed when you’re a veteran at Dennehy’s level. And Liam Neeson makes a small but significant appearance as an ex-con turned writer whose tell-all book talks of the art of prison escape. This film is simply the definition of a two hour cardio workout, with edge of your seat aerobics and an ending that leaves the audience cheering or at the very least, clapping. Think Taken with the intensity of that go-the-distance risk. It’s what anybody might do for a loved one. Or not. But it really works. Beyond any of that, think Slumdog Millionaire, because there hasn’t been a film so desperate, passionate, and against all odds since then. Until this. Four tiaras
