Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

I’ll say this for Law Abiding Citizen: the movie doesn’t waste any time in getting started. Within 60 seconds or so of its beginning, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is on the floor with his hands tied behind him and duct tape over his mouth, witnessing his wife and daughter being murdered by two scumbags during a home invasion. Adding insult to injury, an upwardly mobile prosecutor, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), and the Philadelphia district attorney (Bruce McGill) are afraid of losing at trial, despite Clyde’s eyewitness testimony. Instead, they strike a plea bargain with the greater of the two evildoers, Darby (Christian Stolte), in exchange for testimony that sends the lesser evildoer, Ames (Josh Stewart), to death row. Clyde sees this as a miscarriage of justice and tells Nick so, but to no avail.

Skip ahead 10 years, and Ames is finally being executed, but his lethal injection does not come painlessly — the chemicals having been sabotaged. After his surviving partner in crime, Darby, is found with his body savagely dismembered, Nick and a hard-nosed detective (Colm Meaney) deduce that Clyde has the likeliest of motives, and they arrest him. Nick realizes he needs a confession from Clyde, and he’s forced to acquiesce to his prisoner’s demands for creature comforts behind bars. As Clyde gloats over his steak dinner and iPod from his cell, Darby’s attorney (Richard Portnow) is found dead, and a DVD of Darby’s bloody dismemberment is delivered to Nick’s wife and daughter.

After another brutal and graphic incident, Clyde is moved to solitary confinement (which looks like a dank dungeon — I half-expected the lepers from Ben-Hur to be in the next cell). And despite his isolated incarceration, more attacks occur outside the prison walls, all targeting people involved in the original Shelton case. Nick and the D.A. receive a tip that Clyde is a “tinkerer” who used to work for the CIA (of course he did, all movie characters like this have had CIA training). Despite this knowledge, and the fact that Clyde has had ten years to prepare his coordinated act of vengeance, the authorities suspect he has an accomplice working with him on the outside. As panic grips City Hall over a prisoner locked up in the dungeon, the mystery over who’s helping him builds to a gripping climax…

…Or what should have been a gripping climax, but instead is a groan-inducing “yeah, I’m sure” moment of realization that this movie blew it. I was okay with the film for awhile, appreciating the American accent of Gerard Butler (who is much better here than in the recent and abysmal film Gamer), liking Jamie Foxx in a straight-up dramatic role, and noting the seeming economy of storytelling on display. I was admiring the movie for not going down typical plot paths such as actively menacing the wife and daughter, or intervention from a prison warden with his own axe to grind (as in The Silence Of The Lambs).

But dramatically speaking, it all collapses in the last third of the film, as others meet their doom in plainly telegraphed fashion (including an attack by a weaponized robot — in a cemetery!), the blustery mayor (Viola Davis) rips Nick and the D.A. a new one and then orders a lockdown on the entire city, and the truth about Clyde’s methods are finally, ludicrously revealed. The ending spares us most of the usual histrionics and overused dramatic devices (no “evil from beyond the grave” stuff), but it’s small consolation after the weak resolution.

Law Abiding Citizen is ultimately a letdown, despite the competent cast and intriguing initial premise. Philadelphia-area denizens will enjoy the location work and frequent helicopter shots of their city, but for most everyone else, it’s an interesting but forgettable crime story.