First Hit: Much better than I anticipated.
The trailers for this film didn’t seem very interesting nor am I a big Russell Crowe fan.
This film starts out oddly as John Brennan (Crowe) and his wife Lara (played by Elizabeth Banks) are out to dinner with friends. They are discussing working with a boss who one doesn’t respect. The next morning as they and their son Luke are having breakfast in the kitchen; the cops come to the door and burst in to arrest Lara. This moment in the film is unrealistic.
I just don’t think they would have burst in with that sort of aggressiveness. It takes a bit of time for the crime to be revealed in this film as it is more of a side note. With appeals long past John seeks out advice on how to break his wife out of prison.
Liam Neeson plays Damon Pennington a former prisoner who broke out of prison 7 times and with this experience plays a short but pivotal role in John’s path to break his wife out of jail. The next hour plus is about how he slowly finds the right people with the right information (including using YouTube clips) to help him make his plan. Here the film stays interesting.
The story doesn’t give too much away but does provide enough information to drive the audience into wondering what choice is John making and how is he constructing the plan. When the plan is executed, it takes some intense discussion for his wife to go along with the plan. In the end, she does and they successfully get to where they can spend their lives all together and in some relative peace.
As a twist, at the end of the film a detective tries to find the one clue that would have exonerated Lara, but he just misses, but the audience seeing the clue allows us to know Lara was innocent.
Crowe is effective at keeping his intensity under wraps and not overdoing it. Banks is very good as the mother who understands her son enough to let him find his way back to her emotionally. Neeson is wonderful in his short 5 minute scene. Paul Haggis, Fred Cavaye and Guillaume Lemans wrote a very strong script. Haggis did a really good job of directing this giving Pittsburgh the feel of being a long time blue collar town with an intelligent law enforcement team.
Overall: I was surprised at how much I liked it.