what starts as an intriguing *serious* injustice-revenge story turns stupid... and still serious

Rating: 5/10 (26 April 2010)

F. Gary Gray needs to find his groove again. The director who debuted with Friday went ahead and became a director of dramatic films, like The Negotiator and A Man Apart, films that have their moments if they are, obsessively-repeated TV airings notwithstanding, forgettable. But with a film like Law Abiding Citizen, he should have taken a better look at Kurt Wimmer's script and seen what he had to work with. It's really two movies, sort of shoe-horned in to one another. The first one, at least in the first half hour, would appear to be an injustice-revenge flick where a guy watches in horror as two thugs break into his house and rape/kill his wife and child. But at the trial one of the thugs rats on the other, one of the thugs gets death row and the other pretty much walks. Then, years later, when the one thug is about to be killed by the lethal injection, he strikes his first blow of revenge... and then another... and then...
Then it becomes the second movie, which is basically a comic-book flick (think the Joker in the Dark Knight) set in a realistic urban-crime center. The problem mostly is in this second half, and in how the actors are made to play it. Gray doesn't know really how to make this into something as silly as it really is - how Gerard Butler's Clyde Shelton is the biggest criminal mastermind in the history of, well, this year's masterminds - so he plays it completely straight. As actors, good ones, like Jamie Foxx and Colm Meaney and Bruce McGill go through the motions of the script, it becomes oddly, not as interesting as its premise would make us believe.
Part of this, I wager, is on Butler's end. Some may disagree, but his performance did nothing for me. The character requires someone with a lot more dramatic hump and subtlety, maybe even ambiguity, and Butler, after the opening set-up scenes, goes into a Hannibal Lecter imitation that is just unconvincing (some have suggested it's because he has to put on an American accent, but is that the reason for sure or is it just the material?) And, again, the script and direction clash with a heavy-handed, jarring mix. Some scenes are seriously compelling. Others just had me laughing at how Shelton was able to basically blow up ANYTHING within a hundred mile radius, including cell phones.
Gray could have worked this into something much more entertaining if it left its BS moral complexity at the door. It can't be both styles - dark/deep and crazy - and it should have been either/or; it had the potential to be something that goes for broke, but the absurdity that mounts isn't the right kind with the tone of the film, not to mention the predictability that comes out of the script as it is (for example, any time a character says they wonder if they really did make the right call with the Shelton-family killer, the next scene, dead). It's a split in the film that is never reconciled, and while I could always see a better movie being made out of some scenes, it didn't come together on the whole.