It’s tough time out there, everybody wants revenge for something. So why gum up a perfectly good revenge thriller with atypical moral ambiguity that takes your film’s obvious hero and casts him as the Jigsaw-esque psycho, James Bond villain bad guy? Despite showing sporadic signs of life, Law Abiding Citizen swerves too often into oncoming traffic to grasp that it’s a film about the system screwing a deserving man out of justice, rather than a slick DA learning that winning isn’t everything, and then winning. The movie sports some serious credentials – directed by F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, The Italian Job) and starring Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx – but it ultimately falls in an null field between A-list ambitions and B-list status.
Abiding also tries to be hardcore, but finds that it too frequently pulls its punches. As the story gets going though you find that it’s basically Law & Order with pieces of other movies grafted on to create some kind of cyborg Law & Order episode with more fire power. To wit there’s a scene in the movie where a hillbilly thief is tipped off that the police are coming to see him. An ethereal voice on the other end of the phone (like in Eagle Eye) leads him to supposed safety. But it’s a trap (Saw). An elaborate trap (Saw II, III, IV, V, VI) as it turns out. And the thief is then taken to an abandoned warehouse where he’s carved up into numerous pieces by a masked assailant (Hostel). The killer now plays a mind games with cops from his jail cell (Silence of the Lambs) in order to get what he wants.
When I began breaking down the story thusly, I realized just how stagnant it really was. In the moment, Law Abiding Citizen can be enjoyable for its own merits, but once you start contemplating the ridiculousness of the plot, you begin to appreciate it for all it’s movie of the week grandstanding and cookie cutter characters. Foxx wears this worst of all because his DA character, Nick Rice, is such a tremendous example of human fertilizer it’s hard for you to care. He’s one of those career people that’s all game, on and off the clock. He skips his own daughter’s recital in order to view the execution of one of numerous scum bags he put away. So in predicable fashion we get the juxtaposition of the execution with the girl’s recital, and back and forth, back and forth. Oh, is it dramatic enough for you yet?
The executed scumbag dies horribly. Someone switched out one of the chemicals that causes a painless death and replaced it with something that causes a painful one. It doesn’t take the police long to find the suspect, but then he’s the aforementioned hillbilly that ends up butchered. Both men were part of a home invasion that killed the wife and daughter of Clyde Shelton (Butler). Shelton’s pissed at Rice because Rice made a deal with the more savage of the crooks (the hillbilly) in order to get a death row conviction on the less violent of the two. Naturally, as these criminal situations go in Hollywood movies, one of the crooks was a sadist, while the other “doesn’t want to be here, man.”
Naturally Clyde thinks justice was not served, and he’s probably not alone; Rice so concerned about his conviction record made a deal with give the most horrible of the duo three years in prison. Is this the same United States that has a higher per cent per capita of their country’s population in prisons than any other nation on Earth? Doubtful. Yes friends, Clyde is the true hero of this mess, but he’s treated no better than your average super-villain. Does he not have a right to be angry? Isn’t Rice a short-sighted jerk that clearly never read a witness statement or saw a piece of evidence before making the deal in Clyde’s case? If you were a freelance Q working for the US Department of Defense, wouldn’t you use your skills to get some payback? Actually, make that extreme payback? Exactly! But instead Clyde is treated like some second-string Dr. Evil, while Rice is the crusading hero. And now I’m bored. Law Abiding Citizen does not abide for this dude.
