Everything that Taken did right, this movie did mostly wrong

Rating: 6/10 (17 January 2011)

When you watch a movie about revenge, you want to root for the hero all the way thru the movie and feel sympathetic even when the hero has to resort to violence (e.g. The Brave One, Taken, The Fugitive). Here we have a person who has experienced a great tragedy and has every reason to want revenge. Which is precisely the emotion that I'm sure was intended for the viewers as well. In this movie, the villains are not restricted to the original perpetrators. The Law and the lawyers who manipulate it are also villains in this movie. Initially it appears as if the hero, Gerard Butler, is going to enact his revenge on the Law by means of the great wealth of law knowledge that he clearly absorbed during the 10 years since his unfortunate tragedy. The court scene and initial prison interrogation scenes are brilliant and you can really start to see where an intelligent scriptwriter could have taken this movie to a breathtaking level. Instead, the revenge enacted by the hero becomes too bloodthirsty and the hero stops being a sympathetic character in my opinion. This is where the movie quickly got off track leading to the extremely ungratifying ending. The pursuit of retribution should have followed a more intellectual path, which is where it appeared to be headed.
How much better and sympathetic would this movie have been had the hero exacted his revenge against the legal system by staging assassinations of other violent sex offenders who he had researched over the years that were free due to some legal finagling rather than the lawyers and judges themselves? Imagine Foxx and his legal team trying to outwit Butler, while these sex offenders are mysteriously dying while Butler is still in prison. Tell me that's not a better movie.