Giustizia privata

Let's face it. Because a person is capable of pulling off the kinds of things done here, doesn't make the likelihood any greater. There is so much precision and luck involved in making things work that it would take a god pulling strings to allow these things to fall so easily into place. Even a silent partner is not going to do the job. I enjoyed the setup but the lengths gone through for revenge really pull it apart for me. The guy has so much power that he is completely in control. There would be a point in law enforcement where they would finally say, "Screw you!" The technology would have taken a fortune beyond imagination to work out. While I like the actors in this film, I can't recommend it's far fetched totality. Done in a more controlled and believable way, you have a stunner. It's just too much. And the ending is a real weakness.

Almost everyone agrees. Law Abiding Citizen is a great movie but the ending sucks.

The problem is, with about 30 minutes to go, the movie wants us to stop cheering on Clyde (Gerry Butler) and suddenly start thinking of Nick (Jamie Foxx) as the hero. That's not going to work, the audience has just invested about 90 minutes of wanting Clyde to continue with his vengeance. Damn right too.

The plot should have continued to its logical conclusion. Clyde was trying to teach Nick a lesson, that the system was so broken that it could only be fixed by being destroyed first. Rather than the squeaky-Hollywood-ending-slop they served up, here's what should have happened...

In the solitary confinement cell at the end, Jamie Foxx's character Nick should have taken the cell-phone from Clyde then remote-detonated the bomb at city hall, blowing up the mayor, the brass, the whole rotten system, then gone off to watch his daughter's cello recital.

Now, that ending would have been really insane, but it would have taken the movie to its logical conclusion. Nick's conversion would have been complete. As an ending, it would be right up there with Jimmy Cagney at the end of White Heat, 'Made it Ma, top of the world!' Morally dubious, yes, but it would have given us a bona-fide classic. It would be rating 9.8 here on IMDb rather than this insipid seven-point-bleh.

Oh, and the movie loses a point for Gerard Butler not using his own voice. Gerry is a Scot and has a fine Glasgow accent, he should use it.

I never rooted for Jamie Fox's character, I wanted Butler to kill everyone. The director failed to make me see Butler as a villain. If that was the intention, it didn't mesh. Fun movie though.

I am just not sure which is which.

I am trying to avoid spoilers here, because it is a definite film you must check out because it is a great new take on the prison based thriller genre, which provides 90 odd minutes of great entertainment with lots of twists and turns to keep the story fresh.

My main criticism is that the story seems to twist and turn so much it gets itself into a nasty tangle. The base of any thriller for an audience, is to want the protagonist to prosper at the downfall of the antagonist, but at the end, i was unsure which of one of the two mains, Nick Rice (foxx) or Clyde Shelton (butler) i should be 'cheering' for.

Each Character has their fair amount of being the good guy, but both were more of the bad guy, a very confusing aspect to a thriller.

Never-the-less, there are some brilliant performances and a very entertaining fresh story kept me glued to the screen for the entirety of the movie.

****/5

"Law Abiding Citizen" starts out like a modern-day version of "Death Wish," spends a few moments aping the "Saw" franchise, then settles in as a cat-and-mouse crime drama centered around the theme that the American legal system seems designed as much to thwart justice as to enact it.

The movie stands firmly in the long tradition of wish-fulfillment fantasies in which the victim of a broken legal system - functioning as a stand-in for an equally frustrated and helpless audience - finally says enough is enough and takes matters into his own hands, even going outside the limits of the law, if that's what it takes, to achieve justice.

As with the Charles Bronson character in "Death Wish," Gerard Butler's Clyde Shelton witnesses his wife and daughter being brutally raped and murdered by a couple of armed intruders. When the worst of the perpetrators cops a plea and is back out on the streets after a mere three years behind bars, Clyde is forced to take matters into his own hands. But he isn't content merely to bring down the killers themselves but to systematically go after everyone in the legal system – from strict-constructionist judges to hamstrung attorneys - who helped facilitate the injustice. That's where Nick Rice, well played by Jamie Foxx, comes in, the decent but by-the-book prosecutor who helped set up the deal and has now, along with everyone else involved with the case, become a prime target for Clyde's take-no-prisoners reign of terror and retribution.

The one thing that distinguishes "Law Abiding Citizen" from similar films in the genre is that it's not afraid to have a deeply troubled, possibly even psychotic, character at its core. For Clyde does not fit the mold of the typically lovable antihero. The audience is, in the early stages at least, asked to root him on as a conventional Angel of Retribution dispensing the justice that the court system saw fit to deny him, but so much of what he winds up doing steps so far over the line that we eventually balk at his tactics. It's this moral ambiguity that helps to mitigate some of the implausibility of Kurt Wimmer's screenplay, which often goes for effect at the expense of credibility. Indeed the movie's insistence at making him a sort of omnipotent, omnipresent existential force of nature to be reckoned with takes the movie out of the realm of reality and cheapens some of what it is trying to do. And, in the process of reaching its climax, the movie takes a plot turn so ludicrous and credibility-defying that the whole thing pretty much crashes and burns at the end.

That being said, Nick's interactions with Clyde are fun to watch and, thanks to taut direction by F. Gary Gray, there are some moments of genuine suspense scattered along the way. So if you can put your skepticism and critical-thinking skills on hold for the duration, you can have a pretty decent time with "Law Abiding Citizen."