The next three days

Directed by Paul Haggis. Starring Russell Crowe, Elizabeth Banks, Brian Dennehy, Lennie James, Olivia Wilde, Liam Neeson

RELEASED JUST two years ago, Anything for Her was an enjoyable French thriller somewhat sabotaged by its rampaging implausibility. It followed a bloke who, after a night out, sees his wife arrested for the murder of her boss. The circumstantial evidence seems damning (her fingerprints are on the murder weapon, the victim’s blood is on her coat) but the hero remains loyal to his beloved and, after immersing himself in research, seeks to break her out of jail. There were thrills aplenty, but it never seemed likely that an average Joe could so quickly become a master criminal.

Paul Haggis, Oscar-winning writer and director of Crash, has tweaked the story somewhat for this mildly diverting, overlong Hollywood remake. The film has a more ambiguous ending, and the interweaving relationships are explored more fully. But its latter half is still mired in implausibility.

Russell Crowe, always at his best when dishevelled, does decent work as the low-level Pittsburgh academic who finds his life dismembered by the arrival of impolite police officers to his breakfast table. More convincingly traumatised than Diane Kruger in the French film, Elizabeth Banks has the right class of flayed despair for a wrongly convicted middle-class mum.

It rapidly becomes clear that Haggis has researched almost as assiduously as his hero. We learn how to rob a car with a tennis ball and how to spring a lock with a blank key. We also, courtesy of Liam Neeson’s cameo, ascertain vital information on how to evade police cordons and obtain forged documents. What we do not learn is how any hitherto sober individual could – even under such stress – make the psychological leap towards anti-heroic villainy.

In Crowe’s defence, he works hard at furrowing his brow and scrutinising the shadows for alternative, less dangerous routes out of despair. Washed in the greys and blues of Pennsylvania’s industrial lowlands, Haggis’s camera provides the actor with an effective visual correlative.

For all that, one can't help but consider how stressful it is to go through mere virtual versions of these traumas while playing Grand Theft Autoon the Xbox. The real thing? I just don't buy it, Professor Crowe.

Opens on January 5th