Film of an Angry God

Rating: 5/10 (10 July 2011)

There's something to be said for a movie that's exactly what it advertises itself to be. I loaded up "Law Abiding Citizen" because all the trailers had promised me a gloriously shlocky revenge caper combining the revenge elements of Death Wish with the over the top planning of the Saw series.
And it does have some of that style. Cars are attacked with weaponized bomb squad robots, government officials get killed through wacky cell phone bombs, and other over the top methods of destruction. In the style of many hokey violent movies, a character exists purely to give a speech on how thoroughly trained and bad ass Clyde Sheldon is.
But oh lord does it lose steam every time it thinks its making an interesting point. The movies notion that the justice system isn't working because it just isn't brutal and vengeful enough is never given enough teeth to be meaningful. The way Sheldon's family is murdered in the beginning is nonsensical and is never given much context. Bad men enter his house and kill people, because old men firmly believe that this is a thing that happens all the time. Wouldn't reprisal have represented a more compelling reason? Evil men don't deliberately murder your family without some sort of pretext. Maybe his sketchy military weapons history would have inspired it? But no, they're evil bad men who did it because they're drug-using criminal scum.
He loses of course, because that's how it has to happen in a Hollywood film, but the moralizing delivered by Academy Award Winning Jamie Foxx feels like a lazy bit of tacked on finger-wagging.
I think this movie would have benefited from going either more exploitive or more poignant. The belligerently conservative Old Testament God moralizing about the judicial system seems weird and clumsy, and doesn't match well with the ludicrous plot twists necessary to make the trashy narrative possible.
Make a point. Make entertainment, but don't half-ass both.