Russell Crowe stars as a loving husband who goes to desperate lengths to free his imprisoned wife in Paul Haggis's thriller The Next Three Days. (Phil Caruso/Maple Pictures)

In Paul Haggis’s ludicrous new thriller, The Next Three Days, Russell Crowe stars as a loving husband determined to spring his convicted-murderer wife from prison. A literature professor at a Pittsburgh community college, John Brennan (Crowe) fancies himself a kind of Don Quixote, a romantic man whose actions defy reason. Trouble is, it’s the movie itself that beggars belief.

We could shrug off the lack of credibility if director Paul Haggis were making a mindless action flick. But he's aiming for a serious drama.

In this remake of the 2008 French film Pour Elle (released in English as Anything for Her), writer-director Haggis is working with an intriguingly quixotic premise: What if a man loved a woman so much and was so certain of her innocence that he’d attempt a near-impossible jail break to free her? But from the first scenes, we know we’re not in any semblance of the real world. This is the same torqued-up Hollywood universe of Haggis’s overheated Oscar winner Crash.

It’s a place where all young wives and mothers look like cheerleaders and supermodels. Where it takes a veritable SWAT team of cops to arrest one woman on suspicion of murder. Where the plotting hero plasters an entire wall of his house with charts and maps, with phrases such as “Escape route?” scrawled in big black letters, like some giant billboard advertising what he’s up to.

We could shrug this off if Haggis were making a mindless action flick where credibility didn’t matter. But the Canadian-born filmmaker is aiming for a serious drama, in which we’re meant to feel for these characters and their plight.

The movie opens with Brennan’s wife, Lara (Elizabeth Banks), literally torn from her stunned husband and sobbing three-year-old son to be charged with and of killing her boss. Brennan is convinced his wife isn’t a murderer, but after three years, all their legal options are exhausted and Lara faces a life sentence in Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Jail. Brennan watches with mounting frustration as their boy, Luke (Ty Simpkins), grows distant from his mother and Lara plunges into suicidal despair.

Finally, Brennan decides to take desperate measures. With some sage advice from a Papillon-type ex-con (a scar-faced Liam Neeson), who has written a best seller about his multiple prison breaks, Brennan starts hatching an elaborate escape plot.

The film is at its most believable when Crowe’s rumpled college prof is making his first fumbling attempts at crime. Like a clueless Orpheus descending into the criminal underworld, he tries to buy fake passports from dope peddlers and learns how to fashion skeleton keys and lock-picks on YouTube. There are echoes here of Bryan Cranston’s chemistry teacher dabbling in the drug trade in the far-superior AMC series Breaking Bad. Only Haggis doesn’t have the rich sense of black humour of that show’s creator, Vince Gilligan.

When word comes that Lara is going to be transferred to another prison farther away, Brennan suddenly has only three days to put his plan into action. At that point, this rank amateur miraculously acquires the quick-witted confidence of a master criminal. Amazing what a tight deadline will do.

Haggis’s film follows the outline of the French original, which was written and directed by newcomer Fred Cavayé, but makes a few improvements. For one thing, Haggis doesn’t reveal until late in the movie whether Lara is really innocent. It’s one of his few clever touches, an ambiguity that in a more sophisticated film would raise questions about whether Brennan might be deluded by love, but Haggis only uses it as a tease to keep up our interest in the story.

Crowe gives what has become his customary performance. His American accent is faultless. He’s sexy in a frumpy, bearish way. He lectures convincingly on Cervantes. But we know he’s capable of much more. Once a possible heir to Richard Burton, instead he’s become the thinking woman’s Gerard Butler.

Banks, best known for her comic roles (Zack and Miri Make a Porno, 30 Rock), resorts to acting shorthand to play Lara. She’s hot-tempered to suggest she might have been capable of braining her boss with a fire extinguisher. In prison, she shows up for conjugal visits without makeup or a blonde rinse, her darkening hair apparently indicating her darkening mood.

Haggis stuffs the picture with stereotypical tripe. There’s an obsessive, not to say foolish, police officer (Lennie James), who’ll leap onto subway tracks to chase a departing train. There’s a defiant dirty-rat criminal (Kevin Corrigan) just asking to be shot. There’s even a black-and-white Lethal Weapon-type cop duo, only with Aisha Hinds in the Danny Glover role for gender parity.

Like Neeson, the great Brian Dennehy is wasted in a cliché-ridden cameo as Brennan’s gruff but loving dad. His character is so laconic, even by American alpha-male standards, that you begin to wonder if he’s suffering from laryngitis.

Crash famously divided audiences, and the same could happen with The Next Three Days. There might be some viewers who’ll find it gripping, even moving. But that will require a massive suspension of disbelief that would tax even Don Quixote.

The Next Three Days opens Nov. 19.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBC News.