Law Abiding Citizen
Review
by Anthony Morris
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Law Abiding Citizen
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There
are two kinds of vigilante movies: the ones where the hero - after
seeing his or her family abused and murdered by criminal scum -
declares war on criminals in general, and the ones where the hero
declares war on the criminals directly responsible for his or her
torment. One of the many reasons why Law Abiding Citizen doesn't work is because it's a strange mix of the two - but let's not get ahead of ourselves. When
nice guy Clyde Shelton (Gerald Butler) sees his family raped and
murdered in front of him by a pair of home-invading thugs, he has ever
right to expect justice. Slick lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), on the
other hand, just wants to get the case out of the way so he can keep
moving smoothly up the ladder. So surprise surprise, while the lesser
of the two evil thugs gets the death sentence, the really nasty piece
of work gets off because he cut a deal and gave evidence against his
partner. Fast forward five years,
Rice is now the DA, and when bad guy number two's execution goes
horribly wrong no-one really cares all that much. When
bad guy number one turns up chopped into little pieces, attention
turns to Clyde - and so begins one of those games of cat and mouse that
are totally silly the second you spend even one second thinking about
them. There are plenty of twists and
turns here, especially once Clyde gets himself locked up just as the
vigilante starts targeting members of the legal community, but in every
single case the explanation is so ridiculous whatever tension or
thrills this might have had vanish without a backwards
glance. For example, it's one
thing to kill someone with a remote-controlled robot in a graveyard,
but how did the robot - which is basically a massive gun on wheels -
get to the graveyard in the first place? Butler
gets stuck playing a mild-mannered guy who is also a super-smart
insanely evil genius, while Foxx is just a slick and unlikeable lawyer;
can both guys lose? Actually, no they can't - no matter who wins, the audience is the real loser here.
2
out
of 5
Law Abiding Citizen
Australian release: 28th January,
2010
Official
Site: Law Abiding Citizen
Cast: Gerard Butler, Leslie Bibb, Jamie Foxx, Michael Gambon, Bruce McGill
Director: F. Gary Gray
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