Review: Law Abiding Citizen (with trailer)
THE Michael Caine film Harry Brown may be taking a cautionary approach to the idea of vigilante justice but Law Abiding Citizen just wades in with a big gun and leaves the moral compass in smithereens.
F. Gary Gray's film is about as barmy as they come, with credibility sacrificed at an early stage in the search for easy (certainly not cheap) thrills.
Gerard Butler stars as Clyde Shelton, a family man whose wife and young daughter are brutally murdered.
One of the killers avoids death row by cutting a deal offered to him by fast-rising young prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) much to Clyde's disgust.
Fast forward ten years and the murderer has been granted parole.
But Clyde has been busy. The mild mannered husband has earned a fortune, become a technical genius and turned into a crazed avenger with a bloodlust to match Rambo.
Soon he's torturing and hacking to pieces the man who destroyed his family in a scene more suited to the Saw films.
Clyde seems happy to take his punishment for his bloody revenge but that's only because he's barely got started.
From his prison cell he begins to orchestrate an elaborate series of assassinations designed to bring down Nick and the whole justice system.
Director Gray asked us to suspend belief in films like The Italian Job remake and The Negotiator. But even accepting this is designed as a no brain action movie, it's a much bigger ask here.
Law Abiding Citizen is so far over the top that really it should have been played for laughs. As it is, Clyde's craving for carnage and his boffin-like brilliance for harnessing technology are unintentionally hilarious. And Butler, sporting his crazed 300-face, only makes things worse, Even in prison garb you expect him to throw off the guards yelling, "this is Sparta".
After Gamer, RocknRolla and The Ugly Truth, it's clear that Butler has lost all sense of quality control over his career.
Jamie Foxx, by comparison, has been a shrewd decision-maker, moving effortlessly from Collateral to a Best Actor Oscar for playing blind convincingly in Ray to now giving the Academy further pause for thought with the recent Joe Wright offering The Soloist. So what he saw in this beyond the pay cheque is anybody's guess.
But most of the fault lies in a script by Kurt Wimmer - whose 12 years as a screen writer includes the Thomas Crown Affair remake but also the Milla Jovovich howler Ultraviolet. This isn't his finest hour and it will be far from the best 108 minutes you have had this year either if you really must go and see it.
LAW ABIDING CITIZEN
CERTIFICATE: 15.
RUNNING TIME: 108 mins.
STARTS: Today at the Showcase, Odeon and Cinema De Lux in Derby; Cineworld in Burton.
RATING: 1/5
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