Movie Review [LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN]
Wow. This was a weird one to watch, and it’ll probably be an even weirder one to review. I remember when I first saw the trailer for this flick a while back, and it impressed me a lot. It looked like your standard revenge movie to me: a guy watches his entire family get massacred, the system screws him over, and he massacres back, but the twist of going after the entire justice system was too good to pass up. Sounds like my kind of movie. The addition of a certain Scottish hunk certainly doesn’t hurt matters, either. I’m quite fond of The Butler, and I’ll watch just about anything he’s in, although his face is starting to look more and more like a puffer fish these days. I’m not on the Jamie Foxx bandwagon at all, as I find him overrated and arrogant, but I figure if The Butler is there, it’s going to be quite difficult for Mr. Foxx to ruin this one for me, right? Right?! Well…
I’m surprised to say that it wasn’t Jamie that derailed this one for me, but the sheer ridiculousness of the plot. If you watch the trailer, you get a hint that things are going to get crazy, but this film speeds to Crazytown in the third act, and the film as a whole suffers because of it. It sucks because this thing starts out very strongly. Unfortunately, as the film goes on, it tries to top itself in terms of unbelievable plot twists and gratuitous violence, and instead of being badass, it’s just bad. Things happen in this movie that are so insulting to my cherished common sense that they took me right out of the movie. There were at least seven instances during Act III where I turned to my little sister to share an incredulous look. I can suspend disbelief for a film if it gives you cues in the beginning to suspend disbelief. The problem here is that this is actually supposed to be realistic!
Maybe I’m off, but this film grounds itself tragically in reality when, during the first two minutes of the film, I’m witness to a home invasion where Clyde (The Butler) is bound, gagged, and forced to watch the brutal rape and murder of his wife and little daughter. Understandably, he’s a wee bit upset about this, and trusts that the justice system, namely a lawyer named Nick (Foxx) will come through and put these scumbags away. Unfortunately, Nick cuts a deal that puts one of the guilty men on death row, while the other essentially walks. Clyde’s pissed, and the audience sympathizes. But the film does a weird yet cool thing here: it doesn’t allow you to be 100% on Clyde’s side. The scene where Nick explains why he cut the deal is probably my favorite of the film because, as much as it sucks that one of these douchebags will walk, won’t it be worse if they lose the trial and both of these guys walk? Nick’s argument about “it’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove in court” is absolutely right. But now that I think about it, this thing that I liked may also be one of the film’s problems. The audience does not know who in the hell to side with.
In a revenge flick, you have the guy who is wronged and the wrong-doers. You root for the guy to kick some wrongdoing ass, but the lines here are so vaguely drawn that I wasn’t sure who the wrongdoer was. They try to paint Nick as a slimy lawyer who only cares about his job. They even toss in scenes of him neglecting his cutie-pie daughter and wife to drive home the point that this is a guy that the audience should not like. Why, he takes his wife and daughter for granted while Clyde is grief-stricken that hiswife and daughter are gone! What nerve! But he’s not a slimeball at all, just a guy trying to do his damn job. He’s not the bad guy here, but for a section of the film, he is portrayed as just that. Similarly, Clyde is initially the sympathetic character here. The poor guy has lost everything in the worst possible way, although you don’t get to know his wife and daughter at ALL. Literally, the first time you see his wife, she’s being stabbed and raped. Anyways, he’s understandably outraged that the guy that he saw rape his wife is going to walk, and you feel bad for him. But then, the film turns him from a saddened family man into some sort of mentally deranged killer genius, and even though the film attempts to explain how and why he pulls the stuff that he does, it’s wholly unbelievable. Even though he keeps proclaiming that he’s bringing justice to the system that he believes screwed him over, it gets to a point where he ceases to be a sympathetic guy just taking revenge and becomes The Joker from The Dark Knight. He’s spreading fear and chaos all over the city even though he’s locked up in prison. Everyone’s running scared. High-profile members of the system are being taken out in increasingly horrific ways, and I’m not talking about slimeball laywer-types. These are people just GOING TO WORK AND DOING THEIR DAMN JOBS, and this guy is essentially pulling a Bin Laden on them all. Innocent people who don’t have squat to do with this guy’s wife and kid being killed are brutally murdered, and I am supposed to cheer for this? Huh? I don’t think so, but I really don’t know. The film establishes who is who, shakes it all up, and everything goes straight to hell. I lost all sympathy for the guy, and around mid-Act II, I was puzzled as to whose side I was supposed to be on. Now don’t get me wrong. The laws of screenplays are meant to be broken and don’t always have to be obeyed. Hell, in real life, no one is 100% right or wrong. There’s culpability on both sides, and I appreciated that Law Abiding Citizen included that, but for the love of God, if I don’t have a protagonist or an antagonist, then I’m just plain confused! Should I be cheering when these people are being brutally murdered, or should I be horrified?
The manner in which this guy takes his revenge is also some of the most ridiculous stuff I have ever seen in a motion picture. I mean it. These aren’t plot points anymore. These are contrivances that produced groans in my screening room. I’m going into spoiler territory here, so highlight it to read just how nutty this movie gets: so it turns out that this guy is some sort of super-killer that worked for the government. He can kill people without even being in the room! That guy that ended up on death row? He somehow manages to tamper with the lethal injection machine (which is explained away so quickly and poorly that my damn head started to spin) so that the death is agonizing rather than painless. He somehow manages to nab the other guy and slice and dice him in another unbelievable scene. And since he’s had ten years to plan his revenge, I guess that explains how he bought a building right next door to the prison that he somehow knew he would be transported to so he can friggin’ tunnel in and out of his cell to go kill people. And plant bombs on their cars that no one can detect. And blast the holy hell out of cars with a robot that shoots anti-tank ammunition. Yeah. Yeah. And that barely even skims the surface of the kind of zany Saw-like death shenanigans that go down in this movie. It was so jarring to go from a film that was in our world to a world where this guy basically turns into Jigsaw. The amount of violence in this film was quite shocking, too, and I’m rarely shocked by gore. The beginning attack is shot pretty vaguely. You see the stabbings, but each person is stabbed exactly one time and there is NO blood. The rape is barely shown. I was applauding the film for not going too nutty with that scene. However, the revenge killings are over-the-top bloody and shocking. A man is stabbed repeatedly to death, blood spraying like Kill Bill. A woman is sniped out of nowhere, making me scream out in fright. Various other people get dropped in ways I can barely describe. While the carnage was fun to watch, it wasn’t satisfying. Revenge movies set up the bad guys as being BAD GUYS, so that their deaths are satisfying. These were people who were peripherally involved, so their deaths were more weird and “well, that was mean” than satisfying.
The thing that sucks about these problems is that the performances are actually quite good. The Butler is damn good in this, and had the script not been so damn wonky, I’d be able to call this the best performance I’ve seen him give. He goes from being this heartbroken schlub to a scary, conniving loon and he does it well. I just didn’t like the way that his character was written. It stops being about his wife and daughter and turns into something misguided and weird. Jamie Foxx isn’t quite on The Butler’s level, but he’s serviceable. For a guy with all of this craziness happening, with his family’s lives on the line, he was too polished and restrained throughout the film. Foxx didn’t portray much emotion here. His friends get killed right in front of him on multiple occasions, and his reaction is to make a slightly puzzled face and pant a lot. Denzel would have gone to town with this role, but oh well. The two of them are really good together,and they are fun to watch, but it would have been more entertaining had the story served them better. I was also thrilled to see Doubt‘s Viola Davis pop up as the mayor of Philadelphia, but she isn’t in the film nearly enough. By the way, if you are setting a movie in a city in America that is not LA, NYC, Vegas, or Washington DC, you need to have a character STATE THE NAME OF THIS CITY IN THE BEGINNING OF THE MOVIE. My sister and I were actively trying to figure out where this movie was set. They keep showing you this statue on top of a building that I guess Philly folks are familiar with, but we had no idea! Just show us the Rocky stairs!
So, while I basically spent this review ripping this movie, it actually isn’t terrible. It’s basically Eagle Eye: fun to watch for a while, but goes off the tracks. The leads are good. The violence is well-shot, but hollow. It’s fun to watch for a night with your friends, but this isn’t something that you’ll watch again, and that is a damn shame. It had real potential, and that potential was squandered. Big time.
2 Responses to “Movie Review [LAW-ABIDING CITIZEN]”
It was a good movie up until the ending. If Darabont had stayed on as director it would have probably ended up better.
Funny thing, there was an interview with Butler where they talk about what Darabont would have brought to the film, and and the thing that stuck out was that he said Darabont would have probably brought something more mainstream than what was made. I think it’s funny because after The Mist and the ending he came up for that movie, of which he was offered more money for his budget to change, mainstream isn’t something I think Darabont would have brought to the table.
I thought the dialogue in the scenes in the cell between Fox and Butler were genius
And i clapped in the scene in which he used a t-bone steak as a shank
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