A Movie That Loses Its Way

Rating: 6/10 (21 October 2009)

Law Abiding Citizen, in a way, is a movie that became too big for it's own good. The Gerard Butler character was a mastermind. He was so intelligent that no one could figure out how he was doing the things he was doing. So crafty, that no matter what safety precautions were taken, people were still dying. The problem, though, became very apparent as Citizen was nearing the last half hour. How do you explain it all. It's almost as if 3/4 of this movie was made, and then the makers remembered that they had to end this thing. And so they did. Only what we were given, the resolution to it all, was so anticlimactic (and for that matter, unbelievable) that it was almost laughable. I think it would have been better to leave it a mystery then to give the audience what was one of the most outlandish conclusions to a film I've seen in a long time. That's not to say that what came before this was a masterpiece. The dialogue was, at times decent, and at other times sub-par. The characters were never developed enough for people to really care about what happened to them, and the editing left something to be desired. But even with all of that I was still interested. I still wanted to see where all of this was going, and how all of this was happening. I shouldn't have been so eager. They say that sometimes, the unknown is much more intriguing than the known. I guess the makers of this film should have kept that in mind.