Law Abiding Citizen (2009) – on rental. Imagine a film where there’s a brilliant super-villain who’s always two steps ahead of his adversaries. He outsmarts them at every turn, and plays puppet master as he leads his opponents through a string of intricately planned and staged scenes where despite the illusion of freewill, his opponents really are doing his biding.
My question: how do you end such a film? Let the villain win and get away? That’s what Hannibal Lector did 20 years ago in Silence of the Lambs in a closing scene that’s still talked about today among film-lovers. Or have the villain make a mistake and his pursuers finally catch up and apprehend him? That’s possible – but only if you can somehow craft a realistic situation where the bad guy, despite his vastly superior intellect, fails to realize he’d lost situational control and was walking into a trap.
And that’s the problem with Law Abiding Citizen. The first 90 minutes setup of the super-terrorist’s motives and plans in motion is thrilling, if at too many far too many points still outright preposterous. But the film wraps up its chase in the last 10 minutes based entirely off a mind-numbingly dumb mistake made on the part of the antagonist. The last scene where the bad guy bungles, despite the brilliance he consistently demonstrated, smacks of lazy film-making and as though the script writers realized that they had written themselves into a corner with a guy of such prowess and had no way to realistically end the story.
Gerald Butler plays Clyde Shelton, a family-loving man who’s, professionally, a ‘kinetics engineer’, and the best there is. He’s known as a problem-solver, undertakes black ops, and gets bad guys in ways that traditional law enforcement or even the military can’t. The first 10 minutes of the film move along very quickly. In a home robbery attempt, his wife is raped, and murdered alongside his daughter (incredibly cute actress there, and maybe too much even!). One of the two criminals is let off because of a bungle made by forensics investigation, and the other is betrayed by his companion. Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) plays the hotshot state prosecutor who makes a deal with the criminals in order to maintain his high conviction rate. Feeling betrayed by the justice system, Clyde disappears, resurfaces 10 years later and starts his plans for revenge. He’s not going to just mete out vigilante justice to the two felons; he’s intends to bring down the entire system crashing on its head.
To the film’s credit, there are bits of Law Abiding Citizen that’s refreshing. The film doesn’t have Clyde thinking small: his acts of destruction involve making use of armor-piercing bullets, exotic poisons, exploding handphones and massive napalm bombs that are capable of bringing down entire building floors. There aren’t a lot of films centered on urban terrorism out there (The Siege comes to mind as one of the few), but what you see in Law Abiding Citizen is pretty extreme. While in a couple of scenes where characters get off-ed you see them coming from a mile away, at least one or two will still completely catch you off guard. The supporting cast are mostly good too, though only a couple get any sort of substantial screen time: Bruce McGill as Jonas Cantrell, Nice Rice’s mentor and boss, Leslie Bibb – soon to be seen again in Iron Man 2 – as Nick’s assistant, and Colm “Engineer Miles O’Brien” Meaney as a tough-as-nails detective.
Where the film fails flat, apart from the awful ending, is in so many other places. Firstly, there’s a massive disconnect between Clyde’s early characterization and his actions. He’s initially portrayed as a sane, family-loving man. Granted, seeing your family killed before your eyes could drive you nuts, but his later acts of vengeance that will see relatively innocent bystanders killed just don’t click with what the guy should had been like. The film expects you to believe that the guy retains all his superior intellect and meticulous planning skills but is driven insane by vengeance… huh?! The film does attempt to draw a clearer relation between character and actions in at least two scenes where Clyde’s acts of destruction are questioned, but this disconnect is not actually addressed in dialog – Clyde simply looks away and doesn’t answer, so you never know what to think. Shoddy writing.
Secondly is the main cast itself. Foxx dishes out the same kind of character smugness that you’ve seen before, most notably in The Kingdom where he also played an investigating officer into acts of terrorism. However, his one-note portrayal here kills off whatever little character development Nick Rice has in the film. The character is supposed to realize the importance of accountability, one of the central themes in the story, but Foxx’s performance in this regard is the same in the last five minutes as it was in the first minutes of the film.
More serious though is Butler. I wrote before in my review of The Ugly Truth that Butler in terms of his demeanor seems to suit sensible and serious-minded characters. The first couple of minutes of the film sees him as a family-loving man, and when he learns of the plea bargains made by the two felons, he’s tearful and you really feel for the guy. Those were the actor’s best moments of character portrayal. But immediately when he turns full-blown whacko, Butler’s performance is just painful to watch. Mel Gibson I can imagine doing roles like these (Payback LOL), but just not nice-guy Butler. The movie reviewers elsewhere remark that the film succeeds in portraying Clyde as the antihero and will have audiences rooting for him. My sentiments were quite opposite: I felt zero sympathy for this unabomber-wannabe.
In all, the film trailer looked pretty exciting but the end product was just disappointing.
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