Where are the movies that have any ideas about how to really fix things? Doesn’t anyone have even a radical notion of what it would take? For a moment, I hoped that we were in for a Fight Club-esque finale, something that could be a real gamechanger. Near the end of the film, Shelton informs Rice that his campaign of terror against the city - ironically, Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and the home of the American Revolution - is “gonna bring it all down,” this corrupt system, and that “it’s gonna be biblical.” I had already given up, at this point, but suddenly I had new hope.
#Law abiding citizen film full#
What isn’t forgivable, however, is Citizen’s apparent unwillingness to either go the full distance or to see the upshot of what it advocates. And it’s easy to forgive the movie-standard preposterousness the plot must go through in order for Shelton to carry out his plan to make those pay who make others suffer, and to teach a lesson to those who would set wrongdoers free, however unwillingly.
#Law abiding citizen film free#
It’s easy to feel Rice’s frustration at a system that sometimes has to let the guilty go free because it is designed foremost to protect the innocent… and part of that is down to Foxx, whose power as a screen presence more than transcends how underwritten his role is. It’s easy to feel Shelton’s rage at a system that cannot guarantee maximum punishment for those who do wrong… and part of that is down to Butler, who manages to compel our sympathy even after Shelton has clearly gone down the road of the psychopath. It’s because the film - the script is by Kurt Wimmer ( Street Kings, Ultraviolet) - is so emblematic of the unpleasant streak that runs through the American zeitgeist today, the one that took root after 9/11 and appears to be settling into stay: that we have to do away with what makes America America - like the rule of law and that pesky Constitution - in order to “save” America. Gray cuts quickly from the execution to the cello recital of Rice’s ten-year-old daughter, and it was only later that I realized he was saying: “ This is what we have to do to keep this safe.” That’s not something I agree with, but mere disagreement is not why I ultimately found Citizen so distasteful. One bizarre visual confluence Gray throws at us early in the film struck me, and though I was willing to put it down at the time as a momentary aberration, by the end of the film, when the film finally decided that it didn’t like shades of gray after all, it was clear that that moment was making a deliberate statement after all. So, ten years later - as the condemned murderer is finally up for execution - he reappears to begin wreaking havoc on everyone he deems worthy of furthering injustice, from the murderers themselves to those in the DA’s office. Instead of Sam Waterston fretting over the compromises that have to be made in order to put bad guys behind bars, we have Gerard Butler being badass: he’s not going to take this injustice sitting down. It’s a not unfamiliar scenario to anyone who reads the papers or, indeed, has seen even a single episode of Law and Order. Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler: Gamer, The Ugly Truth) gets another punch in the gut when the district attorney, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx: The Soloist, The Kingdom) tells him that he’s made a deal that will put one of the killers on death row but will free the other one - the far more vicious one - in a mere few years. Gary Gray ( Be Cool, The Italian Job) must have done some last minute editing - and the husband and father is the only survivor. It opens with that kaboom of a bang, a home invasion in which a mother and her daughter are brutally murdered - the “scene of rape” the rating mentions occurs here, though it was nothing more than a suggestion I think director F. It’s all about the brokenness of our criminal justice system, this Law Abiding Citizen flick, which anyone can see is broken to the point at which you want to despair that it will never, can never be fixed.
And then it lost me, nay, threw me overboard when it threw out all the tricksy pointedness and threw its lot in with those who are willing to throw out the baby of the American legal system with the bathwater of its problems. Kept me marveling at how the gray areas were staying gray and the complicated, no-easy-answers stuff kept getting more complicated. Kept me wondering who was the good guy and who was the villain until I started to dare to believe that maybe this would be the rare studio film that doesn’t feel the need to break things down so prettily. It had me at kaboom, this thorny moral conundrum of a film, and kept me for a long time.
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