Film Number 43 – Law Abiding Citizen
Gerard Butler is a top engineer, happily married with a daughter. His entire life is changed within the first 5 minutes of the film when his home is invaded and his wife and child are raped and murdered. After this shocking opening the two men responsible for the murders are on trial. It turns out that only one of the men was responsible for the murders but unfortunately that killer has made a deal with the courts to frame the other man for the crimes. As there is no evidence to convict the actual killer he goes free whilst the other guy goes on death row the. Enter Jamie Foxx a top District Attorney who is responsible for this strange verdict Butler is furious he leaves and the killer is given a jail sentence.
We jump to ten years later, the guy on death row is given a lethal injection that is tampered with and he dies in agonizing pain, whilst the other guy is set free, Butler tracks him down and cuts him into pieces. You see for the last ten years Butler has been planning the ultimate revenge on everyone that has wronged him and his family. What follows is a series of expertly planned attacks and double crosses by Butler who is doing it all from jail.
You have to give the film a lot of credit it cuts all the bullshit and jumps straight into the story; unfortunately there are two big problems. The first being Jamie Foxx, his character is completely unlikable, there isn’t really one point during the entire film when we actually want him to succeed. His delivery is fine but there is no energy or charisma to latch on to. He does however deliver my favorite line in the film, when Butler is in jail and requests his last meal he starts listing all the stuff he wants – “I’ll take the stake and the potatoes with the broccoli, gravy and pomme frites” to which Foxx responds “fuck you and your pomme frites” it doesn’t get much better than that.
The films plot becomes incredibly convoluted but it doesn’t really require too much attention, it just keeps going and going the conversations between the two are more and more tedious. Then when we think the film is out of steam a bunch of people are stayed to death by a giant tommy gun and Butler kills his cell mate by stabbing him in the neck with a steak bone. The violence in this is brutal and realistic, mostly horrible to watch. The problem is that after a while we can’t really be sympathetic for anyone, Butler becomes too brutal to be relatable and Foxx was kind of unlikable from the start. It feels a bit like a film that would get made in the seventies, gritty and violent.
In the end the film is pretty unrewarding to watch, it’s a cold story with little humanity, about twenty minutes too long thanks to character development for characters that we don’t care about.
4 and a half out of 10
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