Senseless, predictable, sloppy

Rating: 5/10 (15 October 2009)

F. Gary Gray's Law Abiding Citizen, about a man using violence to bring down the legal system while behind bars, falls under the weight of its own premise. Butler and Foxx are good, but movie pretends there's a cat-and-mouse game afoot; Foxx's DA has little to do but run from explosion to explosion, and by the end logic and continuity have been cheerfully tossed out the window.
Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is an average guy who's victimized by a home invasion, during which his wife and daughter are murdered while he watches, tied up. The bad guys are rounded up, and district attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) gets one of them to sell out the other, thus making a deal that allows the first to get off scot free. As you might imagine, this doesn't sit too well with Mr. Shelton, who is not happy that the deal was made without his knowledge or input.
Flash forward ten years later, and the convicted felon is about to be executed, and it turns out to not be a particularly pleasant execution - things go wrong, the bad guy suffers a painful death, and so on. Rice eventually puts two and two together and figures out that Shelton's behind it - but it seems that there's more to the situation than meets the eye, as Shelton has an entirely different agenda in mind. And thus begins the nominal cat-and-mouse game, as Shelton continues to wreak havoc while in solitary confinement in Philadelphia's maximum-security prison.
For me, the movie fails on several levels. Although it does have plenty of well-staged action scenes, the logic needed to sustain what's really a psychological thriller is absent in large quantities, as the so-called good guys' actions often don't make much sense other than to propel the plot a bit more.
First and foremost is the motivation. Shelton is mad because Rice took the deal that let one of the guys who murdered his (Shelton's) family go free. Shelton then decides to "show" everyone involved that their system of justice isn't optimal for anyone other than the bad guys; to illustrate this point, he decides to bump off those who had anything to do with the plea bargain. Which makes sense to a point, but Shelton then extends that logic to include anyone involved with those involved with the plea bargain, and even those who happen to be idly walking by (figuratively speaking).
So at first, we're meant to think that Shelton's a victim here (he is), and we really should root for him. We're in his corner. Rice is an egotistical jerkwad who barely notices his family and doesn't prosecute unless he's assured of a victory, so he's easily seen as a bad guy. But over the course of the film, sympathy for Shelton and his situation completely disappears. Which would have been fine if Rice had been shown as an equal match for Shelton's wits - he was instead led around by his nose, constantly several steps behind the villain.
And therein lies a crucial problem with the movie: it's predictable. Yes, there are some scenes that will make you jump, but Gray takes so long in setting them up that you sort of expect them to happen. There's also the problem of showing the best action scenes in the previews and trailers, so you know those are upcoming as well.
This is a standard revenge action film with a twist (i.e., that the antagonist is behind bars while most of the mayhem is occurring) that doesn't even make sense at the end of the movie. Let me put it this way, to avoid spoilers. Throughout the movie, you're wondering how Shelton is able to accomplish his violent deeds while in solitary confinement - really, the only thing the movie has going for it - but when you find out his secret, it's so mundane and eminently avoidable that you wonder what all the fuss was about. In fact, the ending itself is senseless, as a better alternative certainly was available.
You also wonder if Shelton's point about the injustice of the justice system was even really made; Shelton's slaughter of the innocents doesn't prove that the system is injust, it just proves he's a sadistic murderer.
I was fortunate enough to witness a question-and-answer session with director Gray after the movie. I took the following from the session: 1. F. Gary Gray likes doing different types of movies, because he wants to avoid being typecast. And yet this movie wasn't cinematically much different than, say The Negotiator or even Set It Off. So I'm not sure this was an accurate point.
2. F. Gary Gray doesn't think this movie is anything like The Dark Knight. An audience member drew the parallel, but the director seemed to think that his movie was much better than the Batman movie, and he downplayed any thematic similarities. Here's why they're similar. Each film has a psychotic bad guy who spends much of the film trying to get under the protagonist's skin - and usually succeeds while in custody of law enforcement. Both films are dark, psychological thrillers. Both films have antagonists who have more vibrant personalities than their respective foils. The films differ in that the performance of one actor (Heath Ledger) was monumentally better than that of the corresponding bad guy (Butler).
Law Abiding Citizen, hyphen or no hyphen, is an overblown, illogical mess that can be a lot of fun to watch if one checks one's brain at the door and isn't concerned with such notions as cohesion and reason. Things go explody. The end.