Law Abiding Citizen

It's movies like this that make me glad I don't rate movies on a traditional grading scale. I wouldn't even know how to rate something like this. I don't know if I'll be able to review it. Law Abiding Citizen is absurd, ludicrous, exploitive, ridiculous, and increasingly over the top. The entire cast deserves awards for making it through some of these scenes with a straight face. And yet, I can't deny that I was entertained on some level. It certainly held my interest, and I was never bored watching it.

The story kicks off with a family man named Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) sharing a tender family moment with his adorable daughter, while his loving wife cooks dinner in the next room. Less than a minute later, two thugs burst in through the front door, beat and tie up Clyde, and then murder his wife, as well as the little girl. All this happens (I think, I could be wrong) before the film's title pops up on the screen. Flash forward to an unknown amount of time later. A rising young high powered lawyer named Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) cuts a deal where one of the thugs testifies against the other. The thug who testifies gets five years in prison on a minor charge, while the other gets the death sentence. This does not sit well with Clyde, as the thug getting the five years is Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte), the man who actually murdered his wife and daughter. (The one going to death row mainly stood and watched.) We get a sense that Nick is not comfortable making the deal, but he needs to protect his record of successful cases won, as he doesn't feel Clyde would make a good witness at the trial, seeing that he passed out after Clarence tied and beat him. The deal is made, and Clyde walks away fuming that justice has not been served.

We flash forward again 10 years later, and Clyde comes out of personal seclusion to begin seeking his own brand of justice. First he rigs it so that the execution of the thug who got the death sentence goes wrong, and the criminal suffers during the lethal injection process. Next, he kidnaps Clarence Darby, takes him to an abandoned factory, and proceeds to torture him by cutting off his limbs one-by-one while the helpless sleaze lies paralyzed. When Clyde is torturing the killer, it takes a superhuman effort not to think of the maniacal Jigsaw from the Saw movies, especially when Clyde uses a voice synthesizer to distort his voice at one point. Clyde makes no effort to hide his responsibility. He even sends a video of Clarence's murder to the home of Nick Rice. Nick is now a family man himself, with a wife (Regina Hall) and young daughter (Emerald-Angel Young) of his own. Clyde is quickly arrested, but this is all part of his plan. As Nick tries to probe Clyde's mind during prison interviews, he begins to realize that the man is not only out for revenge on a system he feels wronged him, but that he also has everything under his control.

If you've seen the ad campaign, you know that Clyde is somehow targeting and killing different people, even though he's locked away in a prison cell. All of the victims have close ties either to Nick, or to the original deal that gave Clarence Darby a minor sentence ten years ago. Law Abiding Citizen could have tackled some thorny issues involving morality and vigilantism, but it goes for a far more simpler and exploitive approach. My favorite moment occurs when Nick is having a meeting with the judge who originally ruled over the Darby sentence. The judge's cell phone rings while they are talking, she answers it, and she is suddenly killed when a tiny but powerful gun hidden within the cell phone literally splatters her against the wall. Nick reacts to this with what I can only call serious aplomb. More people connected to Nick start turning up dead, mainly during a sequence where a number of his legal partners and assistants are killed in a massive string of car bomb explosions. Soon, the entire city of Philadelphia is feeling threatened by Clyde, since no one can figure out how he is pulling this off from solitary confinement. I will not spoil the answer, because it's just too good. It's so implausible, it will have everyone in the audience trying to figure out how he pulled it off even after they learn how he pulled it off.

As I'm sure you've figured out by now, this movie is about as subtle as a major car accident on the highway. So, why was it so hard for me to get a direct response? Well, just like the extraordinary car accident it resembles, you want to look away but you can't. The movie is manipulative, but controlled. It knows just how far to push so that we react. It's also surprisingly well made. Butler is menacing, without ever having to really create an actual character. Aside from the opening scene, and a sequence halfway through the film where Nick gets some information on Clyde's past that hints at how he knows how to kill so well, we don't learn much about him. Jamie Foxx may be slumming it a little here, but at least he doesn't show it that much. The whole cast handles this material about as good as could be expected, and the movie itself moves at a good pace. And honestly, I was kind of enjoying the absurdity of it all until the last 20 minutes or so. Not only do we get an unsatisfactory reveal, but we get a climax that unsuccessfully tries to cram in massive, bloody violence with a final scene that would be right at home in a Disney family comedy, and comes right out of the blue.

So yeah, Law Abiding Citizen isn't a great, or even a good movie. It's cinematic junk food, and on that level, it's enjoyable for most of its running time. It didn't quite grab me in that guilty pleasure sort of way that G.I. Joe did this past summer, though. So, I guess I'm kind of torn down the middle on this one. Let's leave it at that.

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