Another Hollywood Ending

Rating: 6/10 (26 October 2009)

This was a very, very dark movie with a lot of potential to explore the complex interplay between an individual's desire for revenge and his social contract with the state to forego that desire in favor of state- administered justice. Gerard Butler was wonderful as the "villain" and Jamie Fox did a passable, but unfortunately one-dimensional job as a pompous prosecutor more concerned with self-aggrandizement and his win percentage than doing justice.
Maybe the movie hit a little too close to home since I did a turn for a few years as a prosecutor and wrestled a lot with balancing the capacity of an over-burdened judicial system against the needs of crime victims to get justice (and I don't just mean the simple revenge of a conviction). The reality of that system soured me and made me appreciate how important it is to treat people like people, and relate personally to the bad things that happen to them, but life's ugly side rolls off of Fox's character like water off a duck's back, and even as self-centered as he was supposed to be, that just didn't ring true. The movie's premise is horrifically dark - a man destroyed by brutal crime, and then caught up again in the unethical machinations of the judicial system. The way he turns the system on its head in ruthless fashion is an absolute pleasure to watch, and a real cathartic experience for anyone who feels trampled by the ridiculous fiasco our criminal justice system has become.
Predictably, Butler's character goes very far over to the dark side in his quest, but rather than defaulting to the "violence begets violence" or "hate only breeds hate" theme, and ending with a man destroying himself with his vitriol, this movie took an interesting turn, and played with the idea of spinning that tired theme a bit to make it more didactic, more of a lesson about how the system really *is* messed up and how it can be changed from within if we relearn that justice is a human endeavor, with people affected by every decision. But instead, the movie takes the cheap way out, killing the villain in ridiculously improbable fashion, and lets the self-promoting hack of a DA emerge essentially unchanged by the experience. Boo.