The Next Three Days Ending Explained
The Next Three Days is a thriller starring Russell Crowe as a man trying to break his wife out of prison, but what happened during its ending?
Here’s the ending of the 2010's The Next Three Days explained. Helmed by Paul Haggis, prison-break thriller The Next Three Days is an American remake of 2008 French film Pour Elle (AKA Anything For Her) directed by Fred Cavayé. Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks star as husband and wife John and Lara Brennan – him a mild-mannered college professor and her a hot-tempered businesswoman – whose world is turned upside down when Lara is convicted of murdering her boss after a blistering argument and sentenced to life in prison, leaving John to raise their young son alone.
A few years after Lara’s conviction John is still convinced of his wife’s innocence while almost everybody else – the police, her lawyer, and even John’s mother – think she’s guilty. With all appeals to overturn Lara’s sentence exhausted, John is driven to drastic measures and so consults ex-con/escape artist Damon Pennington (Liam Neeson) to devise a plan to break her out of jail. As the thriller progresses, John gets into all kinds of shady situations trying to prepare for the prison break – buying a gun, securing fake passports to flee the country and even killing a couple of drug dealers for money.
John’s driven, of course, by his unfaltering belief Lara isn’t guilty of murdering her boss but Haggis peppers The Next Three Days with moments that cast doubt over her innocence. Early on the thriller, a flashback shows how Lara could’ve killed her boss and at one point she even ‘confesses’ to John that she did commit the murder. As a result, when John does pull off the prison break and safely gets his family out of the country before they’re caught, the audience are left wondering whether he’s just helped a murderer escape. The final few scenes, however, address this lingering doubt.
During The Next Three Days’ ending, another flashback reveals exactly what went down the evening Lara’s boss was killed in their workplace parking lot. A junkie bludgeoned the boss with a fire extinguisher and stole her purse, bumping into Lara shortly after and leaving a smudge of blood on her coat. In the process, a button popped off the junkie’s coat and fell into a storm drain – a piece of evidence missed by detectives that may have proved another person was present that night. As Lara is about to get in her car, she sees the fire extinguisher and sets it next to a wall not noticing her boss’ body nearby. The flashback shows that all the evidence against Lara – the blood on her coat, her fingerprints on the murder weapon – was circumstantial and she is in fact innocent.
Interestingly, the doubt over Lara’s innocence, at least until the ending, is something that deviates from the French film The Next Three Days was based on. In the original movie, the wife’s innocence is made clear from the get-go, but Haggis opted for ambiguity in his remake – hence why those final few scenes proving Lara isn’t guilty are so important.
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