Promising idea, awful movie

Rating: 3/10 (27 September 2011)

What starts out as your basic meat-and-potatoes, DEATH WISH-style revenge flick turns so ugly, so quickly, with a SAW-like torture scene that it has a tough time fully recovering. The film becomes a bit more intriguing as we see several intricately engineered murders(think FINAL DESTINATION meets Rube Goldberg)that protagonist Gerard Butler seems to be carrying out from inside prison walls. Either Butler's character is one of the most brilliant criminal geniuses ever conceived for the silver screen...or the ending is a completely idiotic and ridiculous cheat. The latter would be my assessment. Which is too bad, because a really satisfying ending to this film might have turned this into a guilty pleasure (or perhaps something even better) instead of the cynical, insulting mess that left me so annoyed and angry with the filmmakers.