THE MOVIE LAW ABIDING CITIZEN

The Movie Law Abiding Citizen

The Movie Law Abiding Citizen

A father's inconsolable grief over his murdered family somehow turns him into a torture porn villain with a grudge against lawyers in Law Abiding Citizen, an illogical, campy joke of a movie that suffers hugely in comparison to F. Gary Gray's earlier fuck-the-injustice-system thriller The Negotiator. That film's reheated cop clichés and admirable ticking-clock pacing are exactly what's missing in Law's coldly impersonal plot, which amounts to little more than procedural-speak and other varieties of hot-air filler material that serve to string together a series of grisly executions. The whole thing stinks of the rancid Saw series's cross-genre influence right from the first scene.

Engineering brainiac Clyde (Gerard Butler) is tinkering with a microchip and trading smiles with his perfect wife and kid in domestic bliss when a pair of random Hell's Angel's types burst in with an ultraviolent agenda that includes gut stabbing and ripped-away panties for the wife, a presumably similar fate for the little girl after she's dragged off-screen, and a full view of the whole horror show for the bound and gagged husband. His mortified gaze conveys the intended message: The cruel world will be forced to pay and pay for this individual tragedy. Soon expressing disgust at the plan of suave, careerist D.A. Nick (a low-energy, sulky Jamie Foxx) to let one of the captured perps skate in exchange for close-the-book testimony on the other, Clyde is overruled in his intransigence and left to stagger menacingly away from the courthouse and its uncaring, travesty-of-justice machinations.

After a home invasion leaves his wife and daughter dead, engineer Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is told that one of the criminals responsible will not be convicted, as much of the evidence against him was compromised by a bungled forensic investigation. Shelton pleads for the prosecutor, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), to take the case to court. However, Rice is mostly interested in maintaining his 96% conviction rate, and tells Shelton that it does not matter what is right, but what can be proven in court. Rice then makes a deal with Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte), the actual criminal who raped and murdered Shelton's wife and daughter, for third-degree murder; his accomplice, Rupert Ames (Josh Stewart), is sent to death row on what is essentially a theft charge. Shelton later sees Rice shaking hands with Darby as if they had just ...