Life seems perfect for John Brennan until his wife, Lara, is arrested for a murder she says she didn’t commit. Three years into her sentence, John is struggling to hold his family together, raising their son and teaching at college while he pursues every means available to prove her innocence. With the rejection of their final appeal, Lara becomes suicidal and John decides there is only one possible, bearable solution: to break his wife out of prison.

Which means that for the whole film you are supposed to be quietly asking whether John is destroying his life, his career and his son’s childhood for a woman who actually committed murder. That is a considerably smarter structural choice than this film generally gets credit for, and it also recontextualises the son’s coldness toward her, since the boy has grown up in a world where everybody told him his mother is a killer.

Now, my actual problem with it. After everything. After John risks his life, spends years on this, and finally gets Lara out, they then have to work out a plan to collect their son. And Lara’s response to that is to open the car door and attempt to throw herself out of a moving vehicle.

They survive it. And then they simply get back in the car, and he locks the door, with an air of right, let us not do that again. It is never discussed. Nobody follows up on it. The film moves straight on to the next beat.

That is an enormous amount to walk past without comment, and it is the clearest example of the thing critics flagged at the time. The Rotten Tomatoes consensus states that Crowe and Banks give it their all, but their solid performances are not quite enough to compensate for the film’s uneven pace and implausible plot. It sits at 50 percent from critics, though audiences have been considerably kinder at 66 percent.

The Liam Neeson scene deserves a mention too. He turns up for essentially one sequence as a man who has escaped prison seven times, lays out exactly what John would have to be willing to do and become, and then leaves. It is an economical, extremely effective use of him, and it functions as the film’s thesis statement.

But setting all of that aside, the film did achieve the thing it set out to do, which is to make me sit there and genuinely ask the question it is built around. Would I do this for my wife?

Yeah. Probably.

It cost around thirty million dollars and took $67.4 million worldwide.

7 out of 10. Recommended, and credit to the algorithm for once.