Great Movie, terrible ending

Rating: 6/10 (20 January 2010)

This movie is fantastic......apart from the last 10 minutes! There's a real sense of injustice followed menace from Gerard Butler and it's one of the performances of his career, totally believable.
Jamie fox is excellent as the career minded self obsessed chief prosecutor and the plot is laid out for us all to see...
The initial court case against the "bad guys" isn't given enough time to develop but that can be forgiven for what follows.
The movie has an earthy quality about it and a realism that I personally last saw in Silence Of The Lambs, a real Hollywood picture without the Hollywood gloss and over production that is ever present these days in it's output.
It's therefore a shame that this movie with such potential should fail so utterly and almost literally fall apart 10 - 15 minutes from the end.
There was an opportunity here to push off the "has to have a happy ending / the bad guy never wins" mentality present in so much Hollywood pap, but no, true to form... the bad guy gets it.
The real bad guy should have been Jamie Fox willing to take a bargain to progress his career and Gerard Butler should have been the wronged good guy, the guy we all sympathised with but no, the movie bosses probably in a fit of panic to ensure there weren't any copy-cat problems reduce the end of the movie to something very predictable.
At the very least I wanted the last laugh to be with our villain / hero Butler, why couldn't Fox's family get a bomb up them as a final parting shot even if he loses in the end ?
The plot and story seemed to just run out of steam, and I knew exactly how it was going to end.
For a character (our hero) to be so clever as to kill his cell mate just to "move a pawn off the board" and as we're reminded by an ex-colleague spy, that "..everything he does he does for a reason" , for him to not spot the ending as easily as I did, is frankly ridiculous.
why is there this obsession with justice prevailing, when the reality is that as in real life justice often doesn't deliver and deals are done with murders. This is surely the message this film was trying to convey so it's ironic that in the end we dissolve back in to Hollywood fantasy.
This was so very nearly a great film unfortunately because of the ending good is about as a good as I can give it.
I'm hoping the directors cut sorts out the ending.