Review: Law Abiding Citizen
A not very good movie that I can recommend because sometimes I have bad taste. So there.
Submitted by mike, 10/20/09 4:22 PM
I’m a sucker for certain genres. I mean I acknowledge that that sounds incredibly stupid because well who isn’t a sucker for certain genres, but I mean insomuch as I’m able to have a critical distance from films that I watch intending to review them for this site, one of the personal subjective (as if anything in film criticism is any less or more subjective than anything else) peccadillos that afflicts me is a soft spot for certain tropes. So know, going in, that I really like movies about lawyers battling Super Evil Criminal Geniuses Who Mess With The System To Do Murder and Theft. Filmmakers who make those movies get away with stuff, with me, that they’d never get away with in, say, a movie about A Struggling Single Mom Fighting An Evil Abusive Ex or about Three Children Having An Adventure And Saving The World. Just so we’re clear.
Law Abiding Citizen is a film directed by one-time video director and possessor of a cool-ass name F. Gary Gray, about a Lawyer who Battles a Super Evil Criminal Genius Who Messes With The System To Do Murder. Jamie Foxx is the assistant D.A., looking for a way to stop the crazy, super-smart ex-CIA “brain” murder designer Clyde Shelton. 10 years after the murder of his wife and daughter and a trial that saw the murderer sentenced to a 3 year term at the hand of prosecutor Nick Rice, Shelton puts into motion a completely ridiculous, incredibly convoluted series of explosive events designed to teach the city of Philadelphia a lesson about “justice”. It is completely, ridiculously over the top, kind of muddled in terms of characterization, and I didn’t really care. The problem with these getting-away-with-murder movies is that the filmmakers have to be running the same game on us as the criminal is running on the prosecutor – we have to be just as in the dark about the “twist” or secret surprise trick that the bad guys are using to evade justice as the lawyers who are trying to bring them down – and this has meant an escalation, an arms race in terms of twistiness or trickiness among filmmakers looking to stay one step ahead of their audiences. Primal Fear featured a bravado performance, Fracture featured some deft slight of hand, and Law Abiding Citizen features a dude in solitary confinement who manages to blow up and mutilate like 83 different people. It’s… hard to credit. It’s also pretty entertaining for no reason I can intelligently articulate. It’s inelegant, clunky, brutally violent and riddled with clichés, but the two leads are good enough, and the twists are just interesting enough, and the sets are authentic enough that it’s halfway enjoyable. If you have a soft spot, you know, for that sort of thing. 7.2/10
