Law Abiding Citizen

Law Abiding Citizen

By Jonathan Fisher, February 1st, 2010

Recently, a movie called Invictus was released about a man who was unjustly imprisoned by a group of racist and hateful men, only to forgive everything upon his release. Law Abiding Citizen has a different perspective. In the opening scene, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) witnesses the murder and rape of his wife and young daughter. After one of his murderers is set free and the other is given the death penalty, Clyde sets about punishing his family’s murderers and the young attorney (Jamie Foxx) that failed to deliver him justice. He first kidnaps his daughter’s rapist, paralyses him and removes every limb and appendage (including that one) in the most painful possible way. After the police capture him, Foxx’s character tells him that he applauds him for his actions. He pats him on the hand and says, “Bravo.”


That exchange pretty much sums up the direction of the moral compass of Law Abiding Citizen, a sadistic and needlessly explicit thriller that collapses on just about every level. The movie’s biggest problem, though, isn’t that it’s morally reprehensible, even though it certainly approves of taking the law into one’s own hands and posits that torturing really, really bad guys (or even good guys who didn’t manage to put the bad guys away) is okay.

No, Law Abiding Citizen’s big failures are much more banal than that. Its villain is one of those bad guys that designs the most elaborate evil plan that relies on absolutely everything going his way. If he wants to kill someone, he doesn’t just go up and shoot them in the head. Instead, he’ll craft a plan that requires his target to hit a certain marker, at which time a specially crafted weapon located across the road will activate itself, fire in a strategic way to frighten his target before finally launching a surface to air missile, smashing the target to smithereens.

The human characters here are given short shift, too. Gerard Butler is constantly given laughably bad dialogue and does his best to make Clyde seem plausible, but to no avail. Jamie Foxx is a career lawyer who doesn’t spend enough time with his family and misses his daughter’s recitals. Where have we heard that story before? Foxx’s character and family situation is hardly original, but originality is not a necessity in movies like this. Here the material is presented in the most superficial way -- his wife nags him for not getting home on time, his daughter idolises him but is disappointed that he’s always at the office. That’s about as far into the family dynamic as we get.

Law Abiding Citizen is excessively, and pointlessly graphic. The audience doesn’t need to see the squirt of blood from Clyde’s cell-mate’s neck after he is brutally killed with a steak’s t-bone. It adds nothing to the story that surrounds it, nor does it force us to question ourselves about what we are watching. It is there because this movie is a shameless venture into nihilism and sadism. Don’t let its pretensions fool you -- Law Abiding Citizen is a nasty piece of work.