“Some justice is better than no justice at all,” says Jamie Foxx playing Nick Price, a Philadelphia prosecutor in charge of bringing justice to the two men that killed Clyde Shelton’s (Gerard Butler) wife and young daughter in Law Abiding Citizen. It’s a statement that speaks to the cracks in the American justice system and as a result Clyde is going to see to it these cracks are turned into canyons once he learns only one of the men will be sentenced to death while the other serves a meager three-year sentence. This is something Clyde simply can’t tolerate.
Law Abiding Citizen is madness, mayhem and carnage all wrapped up into one big dumb actioner filled with plot and logic holes galore. Fortunately, it’s too much fun along the way to even concern yourself with the hows and the whys of it all. All you need to worry about is who is going to die next and how can it possibly happen?
The meat of the film takes place ten years after the murder of Clyde’s family and for the most part in a Philadelphia jail as Clyde confesses to sadistically butchering the man that went free. However, there’s a twist, even while sitting in jail people connected to the case begin dying with the promise of more to come until the system is fixed. If that can’t be achieved — in Clyde’s words — “I’m going to bring the whole system down on your head. It’s going to be biblical.”
The “biblical” beat comes about ten minutes too late in the film, but the promise it provides brought cheers from my audience and deservedly so. Clyde is one bad man and Butler fits the persona nicely, much more so than he fit into films such as P.S. I Love You. Jamie Foxx pretty much steps in and offers exactly what you would expect. There’s very little to Foxx’s game, it would seem, that we haven’t seen yet.
Boasting a couple of co-stars you love to watch such as Colm Meaney and Bruce McGill, director F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job) fashioned a film far more violent than I expected and a lot more fun than it deserved to be considering its sloppy narrative.
Scripted by Kurt Wimmer (The Thomas Crown Affair) the plot is about as silly as was Wimmer’s awful 2008 crooked cop feature Street Kings, but where that one relished in serious drama, this one bathes in destruction as you sit back and soak it all in, only hoping for more. Nothing that happens after this film’s opening ten minutes would ever actually take place in real life, but this isn’t a picture hoping to convince you it’s real as much as it wants you to behold the glory of its made-up reality as the action provided makes that a possibility.
While making a worthy point regarding the American justice system, Law Abiding Citizen entertains to the point you don’t mind the stupidity it takes for each situation to occur. The ending is the most outlandish moment of the entire feature, but if you are having as much fun with the film as I was, once you get that far you won’t be too bothered.
