In ‘Next Three Days,’ a wrong conviction is wrongly — and tediously — set right

When his wife is wrongly jailed for murder in "The Next Three Days," Russell Crowe tries to spring her by becoming the criminal she isn't.

The moral algebra gets a little confusing. Certainly it lacks the clean lines of "Conviction," wherein Hilary Swank rescues her railroaded brother via hard work and fervor, going to school and becoming his lawyer.

In "The Next Three Days" John Brennan (Crowe) finds that no amount of legal effort and expertise will help.

This after his wife Lara (Elizabeth Banks) is convicted of homicide on the strength of circumstantial evidence that suggests she murdered her boss after an argument.

Lara is prone to argument, as we see in the movie's opening scene. John and Lara are out to dinner, and after a glass or two of wine, Lara tires of her sister-in-law's subtle digs and douses her in rhetorical acid. So Lara's a bit of a tigress.

Not a hanging offense, but it does look bad when she chews out her boss and minutes later is found standing over the woman's bludgeoned body with a bloody fire extinguisher.

"The Next Three Days" is sluggishly, haltingly directed by Paul Haggis. Its first half suggests a standard miscarriage of justice movie, and rolls along like a glum procedural.

Then, as it becomes evident that legal appeals won't help Lara, the movie turns. Like left-out milk, but it turns. John starts talking to seedy characters (Liam Neeson pops up in a cameo) about buying guns, lock-picking, fake IDs.

We see that in his desperation, and in his own quiet way, he's contemplating a jail break.

That would make "The Next Three Days" a thriller, as the time-sensitive title implies. A more honest title would have been "The Three Previous Years" - that's how long it takes John to get on with things.

It's hard for Haggis to make the jump to thriller hyperspace after the stodgy opening acts. And when it does go jailbreak on us, it does so unconvincingly.

John turns into Omar from "The Wire" and starts robbing drug dealers for venture capital. Try not to laugh as English prof John prowls the mean streets (of Pittsburgh!) in his corduroy jacket and his Prius.

Things go wrong and shots are fired and collateral is damaged, and though Haggis takes pains to underline John as a reluctant exterminator of lower-middle-class people, the movie is left with an unbalanced ledger - do we want to see a wrongly convicted murderer sprung by an unconvicted one?

It's possible that Haggis wants to tell a nuanced story of muddied ethics, but not likely.

His white-knuckle, on-the-lam finale rests solely on the viewer's interest in seeing John and Lara in some kind of "Shawshank" epilogue paradise.

Just a little colder.