In Law Abiding Citizen, a classic sub-genre — the decent-man-pushed-too-far-by-the-weakness-of-the-system action film — gets a new-millennium makeover, and while the makeup is a little thin in some spots and a bit clownishly garish in others, there's enough grit and greasepaint in F. Gary Gray's soulless-but-competent thriller to keep your eyes on the screen and off your popcorn. In keeping with the traditions of the sub-genre, Law Abiding Citizen opens with a crime, as two thugs burst into the home of engineer and family man Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) and kill his wife and daughter. The lawyer assigned the case in the D.A.'s office, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) looks at the case and the evidence and makes the tactical decision to accept one of the thug's confession and testimony, earning him a three-year stretch — and the death penalty for his partner. Clyde doesn't think this is exactly justice, but as Nick explains, "It's not what you know, Clyde, it's what you can prove in court."
Flashing forward 10 years, Nick goes to see one of the thugs be executed. And in the interim, Clyde has been busy. Very busy. Clyde's made a series of arrangements — to punish both the thugs, to have the hiccups in the workings of justice smoothed out by a brute blast of vengeance. And once the people the justice system let off easy are punished, Clyde's got a plan to make the entire justice system pay for what it did. …
The blunt fact of it is that Law Abiding Citizen goes well beyond the realm of, to use a piece of legal terminology, reasonable doubt and hits the hammer until it arrives at the neighborhood of sheer ridiculousness with its tires smoking. Clyde, we learn, was a consultant for the Government, working on "low-impact kinetic operations." More directly, Clyde killed people while he wasn't even there with an arsenal of dirty tricks and high-tech toys to maximize distance and deniability. And now he's using everything he learned against the city of Philadelphia to make it pay for his sorrow. "I'm gonna bring the whole diseased, corrupt system down on your head," he tells Nick. "It's gonna be biblical."
Butler's crafty craftsman killer is, not to beat around the bush, a raccoon mask or a smear of lipstick away from being a Batman villain like The Riddler or The Joker. Writer Kurt Wimmer has a flair for the ludicrous — he wrote the ambitious yet flawed Equilibrium and the stylishly ludicrous Ultraviolet; Law Abiding Citizen gives up the sci-fi flash of those films for what's supposed to be gritty urban realism but is, in its way, just as ridiculous. But many people, by the time everything's explained, will already be on board firmly enough that the nonsensical — or, rather, more nonsensical — contortions of the plot at the end of the film won't throw them loose.
Both Foxx and Butler are good (although in Butler's case, that may be a simple function of his not being in a wretched script for once — after The Ugly Truth and 300, I wondered if Butler read his scripts or just sat on them to determine if he should sign on board) and there's some nice lively faces in supporting parts — Colm Meany is a dogged Philly cop, Viola Davis the besieged Mayor, Bruce McGill Foxx's savvy boss. A better film would have asked us to actually take sides in the argument — the righteous wronged man versus the representative of law and order's occasionally expedient machinery, the difference between justice and vengeance, the question of why we have a system of due processes and precedents and checks and balances if it can let a murderer shift the blame and walk free while his partner pays the ultimate price for a crime he didn't even commit.
But Law Abiding Citizen doesn't want to actually talk about those things, just use them; there's a few flashes of directorial wit (like how Gray cuts between an execution and a grade-school music recital, two very different public spectacles defined to support the public good), but then they get waylaid in favor of explosions, shocks and Butler's brilliance. Law Abiding Citizen knows what it wants to do; its leading men are charismatic, there's at least two great gory surprises in it, and Philadelphia looks great even under siege. Law Abiding Citizen isn't high art; it's the filmed equivalent of a page-turner paperback you'd buy at the airport for a long flight, finish just before touchdown and forget even before your baggage made it onto the carousel at your destination.
Posted on October 15, 2009 at 11:19 am
I do want to see this movie, but like many movies like this, not enough to see it in theaters. I loved Equalibrium though, despite it’s faults (Ultraviolet, not so much.)
Posted on October 22, 2009 at 9:03 am
It was a movie that felt a first a lot like Payback, where you root for the bad guy…but then you realize as you are rooting for someone who is killing people, you really have to dig deep and ask yourself why you’re rooting for this villian…
I’m doing a movie review of this tomorrow morning for a local radio station, I’ll post more of what I read when I do so.
Posted on November 24, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Truly great movie for the hardcore crime drama lovers.Feels a bit like “Saw” with Butler being, of course, Jigsaw with schemes and plots to counteract every false move of the Philly Police Dept.