A review well thought out in the beginning but failing near the end

Rating: 7/10 (28 August 2010)

When I was going in to this movie I was thinking that "this movie is going to make me think," and lo and behold that's about the only thing I was able to think throughout the whole movie.
In all honesty though, Law Abiding Citizen is a movie that in trailers presented itself very well, but ends the movie by jabbing a pencil into its open eye socket. We open with a scene that depicts the brutal crime against Clyde (Gerard Butler) and his family before jumping to the trial. Attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) cuts a deal with one of the offenders against Clyde that lets him off the hook. Jump years into the future and Clyde has turned full circle and decides to take a full out revenge against the killers and the justice system.
I'm sure most people are thinking, "well bonkers (yes bonkers, I said it) this sounds like a culturally significant movie that challenges the morals of today's justice system with such a plot line as that," and that is precisely what the movie trailers wanted you to think. Law Abiding Citizen is one of those movies that has a first act interesting (and by interesting I mean intelligent) enough and raw enough to make you lean forward in your seat close enough so they can smack all the intelligence out of your brain with the rest of the movie. In short, Law Abiding Citizen is misleading, and at the very best, killed by limitations.
The main reason for this is because it spends the first part of the movie making you feel sorry for Clyde. Its something we've seen happen before. It is the story of the man whose daughter gets raped (in this situation family killed) and he sees the rapists go free. He then jumps into action by doing what the law couldn't do, and that is serve justice on their asses. This movie takes it a step further, reminiscent of Death Note (simply in the taking the bad guy and making him easy to identify with at first before making him absolutely bat **** insane). It then proceeds to realize that it might be getting a little too intellectual for the normal blockbuster crowd and proceeds to add explosions and to completely drop all the points it was trying to make but inserting the picture of the story writers genitalia in your face.
No, in all reality, what Law Abiding Citizen feels like to me is a movie that got cut short, either in money, time, or manpower. It feels like the writer got choke chained by the producers and didn't have the time to write the challenging cultural piece he was going for. Either that or someone told him Gerard Butler was going to be in it, and somewhere a black guy was falling down an oddly placed hole.
While I can't say this movie is lacking at all in the acting department, I can't stress enough how misguided the previews and indeed the movie itself are. Bottom line, you aren't getting a well thought out movie here. I would honestly like to say don't waste your time, but like a few recent Dean Koontz books, there are just a couple parts of this movie that everyone could see. What is lucky about this movie is that it isn't the only challenging moral movie ever made. If you feel this movie is lacking just give it another five or ten years and someone may come along with a good enough schedule or budget or idea to actually get the point that got lost in the explosions in Law Abiding Citizen in some other high brow titled movie.
Final Rating 7/10.