The Next Three Days

The role calls for someone average, nearly anonymous — someone like you or me — and at this point in his career Crowe is built to tangle with giants. He doesn’t have the crazy gleam that an actor like Mel Gibson, love him or hate him, would bring to the proceedings, nor does he possess the deluded intensity of Liam Neeson in “Taken,’’ a silly movie that was a hit for that reason.

Neeson turns up for one scene in “The Next Three Days’’ as a prison-escapee-turned-best-selling-author — I guess he skipped the book tour — who advises John in a patently absurd Brooklyn growl. So someone here is having fun. It isn’t Crowe and it certainly isn’t the audience. Because the star’s presence overpowers his part, the movie’s most interesting idea falls flat. How would a normal guy plot a prison break? With plenty of mistakes, that’s how. Yet we howl with disbelief when John, needing fake passports, simply drives to a bad neighborhood and asks the crack dealers. And wouldn’t this man, upon buying a gun, already know “where the bullets go’’?

The wife was convicted of murdering her boss (Leslie Merrill) in a parking garage, and the film tries to leave the question of her innocence open via a clumsy series of flashbacks. Banks wilts slowly and sympathetically over the course of the movie, but it’s a thankless job. Appeals are exhausted, Lara’s attorney (Daniel Stern) gives up, and even the couple’s young son (Tyler Green) is ready to throw in the towel and admit that mom’s a lifer. John stolidly forges ahead, selling his belongings and plotting Lara’s escape on a large, carefully notated wall map, just in case company comes by.