‘The Next Three Days’ An engrossing thriller

November 20, 2010 at 12:00a.m.

Orlando Sentinel

Paul Haggis is back to his tricky script tricks with the thoroughly engrossing prison-break thriller “The Next Three Days.” He foreshadows, hides details, delays his “reveals” and does a pretty good job of keeping us guessing, even if we remember the 2003 French film he adapted for this Hollywood project.

Russell Crowe, one of the few actors able to suggest “mild mannered community college teacher” and “obsessed husband capable of breaking his wife out of jail” at the same time, stars as John, that teacher whose wife (Elizabeth Banks) has been arrested, tried and convicted of murdering her boss. John almost but not quite takes his lawyer’s bad news lying down.

“I need you to look at the evidence,” that lawyer (Daniel Stern) begs him. “Lara is not getting out.”

John, being an academic, starts doing his research. He’ll watch how-to videos on YouTube and come up with a plan, a plan he’ll have to change, on the fly, time and again as he realizes just how out of his depth he is as he undertakes this.

Haggis bounces back and forth with the narrative, catching us up on “the last three years” counting down to the attempt. That allows the director to establish the sexual heat Lara and John have as a couple, her devotion to their young son and the toll prison has on her. It’s what justifies John’s declaration, visiting her in a Pittsburgh jail, that “This will not be your life.”

Haggis deftly makes great use of terrific actors in brief but important roles. Liam Neeson knocks his lone scene out of the park, playing a convict who escaped from numerous prisons and lived to write a book about it. Brian Dennehy plays John’s distant dad, a man who has no lines in his first few scenes, saving his words for when they matter. Lennie James and Jason Beghe score as cops who eye the husband of the convicted killer with suspicion.

Banks does only a so-so job of suggesting a woman who might be capable of this crime, and yet who dies a little every time she looks at her future and sees no husband or son in it. But this is Crowe’s movie to carry, and he does it with an earthy realism that reminds us of the actor he is beneath the persona. It’s no stretch seeing him as a man of action. But we believe John’s desperation, his clumsy blunders when dealing with the criminal element he needs to enlist in his scheme.

Some story threads feel a little off. The hot young single mom attracted to John (Olivia Wilde) is a Hollywood producer’s fantasy of a supermodel who falls for a community college literature teacher, though Wilde makes her character credible enough that their encounters don’t stop the movie.

Haggis likes doling out clues, false leads and red herrings (some a little too obvious). As he has fun leading us on, we have fun letting him, making “The Next Three Days” a detail-oriented thriller that lets us keep up even as it races to a conclusion.