The Next Three Days

Paul Haggis remade Pour elle, Fred Cavayé’s 2008 debut feature, and the difference is not a scene but a piece of information. The French version shows the audience the real killer in an early flashback, so you know the wife is innocent before her husband does. Haggis withholds it. He has said the film rests entirely on the husband’s belief in her innocence, which is why no flashback ever comes from her side, and that he does not know himself whether she did it. The planning came out of his own searching: he has described going online to look up how to break out of prison and how to break into a car, then using what he found. He chose Pittsburgh because he wanted a city where an interesting jail met a tax incentive, and wrote the script to those locations. Shooting ran through the autumn of 2009 and finished on 14 December after 52 days; Danny Elfman wrote the score. Liam Neeson turns up in one scene as a fictional seven time escapee whose book John digs up online. A good fit if you are content to watch the rehearsal rather than the escape, the key tests and timed runs. Not for anyone who wants the proof of innocence the French original hands over, because Haggis never supplies it.