In his third outing as a director, Paul Haggis leaves aside political editorializing to focus on the intense efforts of a teacher to free his wife from 20 years' imprisonment on a murder charge by the only means left to him -- engineering her escape.

Although involving, this remake of a recent French film never reaches the anticipated heights of excitement and suspense, and Russell Crowe's subdued characterization of an ordinary man who undertakes extraordinary actions remains a little too ordinary. This Lionsgate release looks headed for moderate box-office returns.

Computer programmers, economics students and identical twin brothers on the Harvard rowing team may not seem like the ideal characters for an interesting film, but realizing this disparate group of characters were involved with the formation of Facebook and the resulting lawsuits borne from its success might make one think otherwise. Grated, after last month's "Middle Men," we deserve the right to be wary of any movie about internet pioneers, except that this is director David Fincher working from a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin... bitch.

That's all that's needed to separate "The Social Network" from being a run-of-the-mill play-by-play of what went down after Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, instead being a unique film with so many layers it would be impossible to appreciate all of them in just one viewing.