A good film that could have been great, with a puzzlingly bad ending

Rating: 6/10 (24 September 2010)

Law Abiding Citizen is a pretty good movie, right up until the end when it regresses like a 50 year old man going through a midlife crisis. After establishing itself as a provocative and fairly intelligent thriller, the film concludes with all the depth and nuance of a bad 80s action flick. It's almost as though this story was originally conceived as a 6 hour miniseries for television but then it was turned into a big screen project and some doltish studio executive arbitrarily ended it after what would have been the first episode.
The film opens with a vicious home invasion where Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) witnesses the murder of his wife and daughter. The killers are caught but when the DNA evidence is tossed out on a technicality, prosecutor Nick Rice (Jaime Foxx) decides to make a deal. The man who actually did the killing agrees to testify against his partner, sending him to death row while receiving only 5 years in prison. Clyde begs Nick not to do it. Nick, however, cares more about maintaining his high conviction rate than about Clyde's slain family. 10 years after that fateful decision, Clyde returns and launches a brutal string of murders to teach Nick and the whole world a few lessons about the true meanings of justice and responsibility.
The only complaint I have about the first 3/4 of Law Abiding Citizen is that the pacing is a bit lax. Director F. Gary Gray does a poor job of creating a sense of constantly rising tension and danger. Outside of that, this is a smart and surprising story that engages both the head and the heart. It asks a series of compelling questions about the morality and ethics of our criminal justice system and the personal accountability of those who work in that system.
Unfortunately, the last quarter of this movie is dumb. I mean, really dumb. I'm talking about "guys who think strippers really like them" dumb. None of the ethical questions posed or moral dilemmas presented in the first three-quarters of the movie are resolved or even acknowledged by the conclusion. The arguments it advances are suddenly short-circuited, seemingly just so something can get blown up real good. It's like a chess match that ends with someone getting a pie thrown in their face. I don't know if there came a point where writer Kurt Wimmer realized that he didn't have any answers to the philosophical questions he was asking in this script, if he was afraid of answering them or if someone didn't like his answers, so they were removed and a hunk of insultingly cheap and callow crap was inserted in their place. All I know is that the more you like this movie, the more disappointed you'll be in the ending.
Acting wise, Gerard Butler does some fine work here. He plays Clyde Shelton as a man consumed by a cold rage and an unshakable determination to make everyone else understand why he's angry. He never lets the character lapse into easy insanity, nor does he try too hard to make him sympathetic. His performance embodies the challenge the story presents to the sensibility of viewers. This is a film that actually wants you to think about things.
The rest of the cast isn't called on to do nearly as much as Butler but they're all perfectly adequate. Except for Jaime Foxx. He's basically terrible. He gives Nick Rice none of the depth or complexity that Butler grants to Shelton. Foxx looks like he only wanted a paycheck and fakes his way through the role without ever thinking about who Nick Rick really is or what he does. It's like his agent told him he's the hero in the movie and that's all the preparation Foxx did for the job. As good as Butler is, the fact that he gets nothing back from Foxx in their scenes together does prevent Law Abiding Citizen from being as good as it might have been, even with its lobotomy of a finish.
I don't know what went wrong with the conclusion of this film. But even as bad and unsatisfying as it is, the rest of the movie is still good enough to recommend. After about 90 minutes, you might be better off walking out of the theater and making up your own ending in your head. I can guarantee that it'll be better than what you'd see on the screen.