Kurt Wimmer buckles under pressure; goes with the "safe" ending

Rating: 5/10 (25 July 2010)

"Law Abiding Citizen" is a movie that got me angrier than "Transformers 2" and more disappointed than "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End." Yet, I'll probably watch it again. And again.
See, "Citizen" inspires a rare sort of hatred in me. 90% of it is a provocative, fearlessly cathartic and hauntingly relevant piece of social satire mixed with a grade-A action thriller script and top-notch acting across the board. That's why I'm going to watch it again, despite how terrible the ending was.
Without giving anything away, the movie spends all of its time making us know that Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is a meticulous planner who's serious about getting even with the system of justice that allowed his wife and daughter's true killer to go free with a mere 3-year sentence. Literally every move the justice system and his ex-attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) make, Shelton has already set in motion countermeasures for that step and the next three they will take. Rice is characterised as a smarmy, ladder-climbing political manoeuvrer who cares more about his reputation as a prosecutor than dispensing actual justice. Not once during the course of the movie does he ever, ever admit that he was wrong not to pursue full conviction for both the killer and his accomplice, or even conceded that Shelton was cheated out of justice by a corrupt and broken system of law. "Some justice is better than no justice" is the phrase he uses to rationalise his decision. This being a very anti-establishment film, it's clear that the intention was for us to see Shelton as, though a morally ambiguous psychopath, a man who sees the justice system for what it really is: a mere system. A cold, soulless, illogical, by-the-book factory made up of bored and overworked people that treat justice "like it's an assembly line." Rice, therefore, represents the system then, in both occupation and personality: he's incorrigible, he's utterly cocky, and he refuses to acknowledge fault in himself or make any concessions for Shelton. Though he clearly believes in justice, he's still part of the problem. Right?
You're right. That was the intention. However, "Law Abiding Citizen" ends up being just another crime thriller. The "psychopath", the societal outcast, is punished and ceased, while the clean, self- righteous lawyer finishes the job just in time to make it to his little girl's cello recital. No, really. That's where it ends. In fact, once Shelton is killed, it cuts soundlessly to the recital and then goes black. A quiet, abrupt end. Despite everything that had been built up, it just ends.
I find it hard to believe that this was the original ending that the writer of "Equilibrium" intended to have. This movie reeks with the pungent stink of producer tampering. The quality and style of the ending doesn't match that of the rest of the movie. I wouldn't be surprised if that was intentional, if that was Kurt Wimmer's way of spiting whoever forced him to change the ending, the one where the psychopath succeeds in uprooting the corrupt system, succeeds in bringing "the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on (Rice's) head". The ending was far from "biblical". It was a short, quiet, but mostly ugly, cop-out. Because of that, I'm cutting the score I would have given this movie, a 9, in half. It's rounded up because I feel like this movie could've really said something, could have stood out, had it not ended like every other movie that gets cranked out of the old Hollywood assembly line these days.