Film review: Law Abiding Citizen

Published on Friday 20 November 2009 18:05

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN (18) Director: F Gary Gray Running time: 109 minutes *

HARD on the heels of Gamer and The Ugly Truth comes Gerard Butler's third film release in the past two months. Which prompts the question: does he sleep? If not, I recommend he watches his own inept and preposterous snoozer about revenge and the family guy.

Butler produces and stars as Clyde Shelton, whose wife and daughter get raped and murdered before the opening credits. The killers are soon caught and Jamie Foxx is the city attorney who promises Clyde justice but ends up striking a plea bargain that allows one perpetrator to escape with a light sentence so his less culpable accomplice will be executed. "In this job, your best asset is a short memory," lawyer Rice advises his distraught client.

But rather than forgive and forget, Clyde goes all Charles Bronson. When one of the killers is executed ten years later, he replaces the chemicals in his lethal injection with something more agonising. Then the other murderer is abducted, tortured and slowly dismembered.

You'd think this would be where Clyde's beef ends – but not when your movie's main currency is gratuitousness. Mere prison bars cannot hold a man who turns out to be a brilliant gadget builder with espionage experience and a mind that teems with gruesome ingenuity. Despite being in the clink, and later solitary confinement, he manages to slaughter anyone associated with his case in a variety of complicated, unpleasant ways, including a lethal plastic fork, a car bomb and a killer mobile for a judge unwise enough to answer her phone in a meeting. I'm with Clyde as far as the phone goes, but basically, this is Saw with a law degree.

This is also a film to make you wonder what kind of scripts are in Jamie Foxx's dustbin if he feels compelled to accept a role in Law Abiding Citizen, which gives him nothing to do except act with his jaw and phone his beautiful wife (Regina Hall) to tell her he's not going to have time to see their daughter (Emerald-Angel Young) at her cello recital: a touch that seems to exist only so director F Gary Gray can hack about trying to remind us of The Godfather.

We've seen this film before and, in order to believe Butler is the kind of man who can bring a city to a standstill with his evil genius, he really needs smarter serial killer banter than "Feel that? It's a rare poison, isolated from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish."

Law Abiding Citizen is a guddle of clichd villainy, righteous but incoherent indignation at the inadequacies of the US legal system and a heroic ignorance of engineering: apparently one man, given ten years and a grudge, can dig a network of tunnels of such length and size that Isambard Kingdom Brunel would swoon in admiration. It makes The Shawshank Redemptions' Andy Dufresne look like a slacker.

Law Abiding Citizen was supposed to be directed by Shawshank's Frank Darabont but I don't think it was just the tunnel issues that made him withdraw. As for Butler? He has to get himself into more action movies Matt Damon might say yes to, and fewer that Nicolas Cage might star in.

General release from Friday

• This article was first published in Scotland on Sunday on 22 November 2009.