Saturday, 9 January 2010

Law Abiding Citizen


Gerard Butler stars as an everyday husband who has a perfect wife and a ridiculously cute and pretty little daughter whose domestic tranquillity is shattered when two men force entry into his house,batter him almost senseless and murder and rape his family in a fairly graphic scene.Ugh.

Naturally he recovers and soon he finds himself in court where the two villains are being prosecuted by hotshot lawyer Jamie Foxx.A little bit of plea-bargaining later and one is sent to Death Row after the other turns state's evidence.Gerard is not happy and is left bemused at what he sees as a miscarriage of justice.Fast forward to the execution of the condemned man who is due to die by lethal injection,only for the painless procedure to completely go awry and the man dies in screaming agony.

The other killer is then kidnapped by what ostensibly appears to be a patrolman and taken to a remote location where the officer turns out to be Gerard,and he utilises a power saw to dismember the man into 25 pieces.As you do.So we have a standard revenge thriller and soon afterwards Gerard is arrested and sent to prison.Shortly afterwards,whilst he is in prison,every person connected to the original case start to die in various grisly and mysterious ways - but Gerard is in custody.......

Now in all revenge thrillers the audience must be clearly on the side of the protagonist to elicit our sympathy and the story must be in black and white - dogged and resourceful hero and lots of despicable bad guys for him to dispose of,examples ranging from the sublime Death Wish with Charles Bronson to the more recent Taken with Liam Neeson.But we don't have that here.Gerard (for he is blatantly the killer) blazes a path of retribution through research assistants,judges,lawyers etc as well as butchering his cellmate in a welter of blood.

But these people are just doing their job and his sadism is obviously misplaced.There is a ridiculous explanation to how he commits all these crimes from solitary confinement and a fairly daft denouement.

Now let us be quite clear on this - Gerard is meant to be the sympathetic character here but surely his crusade should have ceased after he killed the two villains - why on earth he decides that a lady research assistant deserves his wrath is both unclear and illogical.These people are innocent rendering the whole narrative completely lacking in credulity.A missed opportunity and Mr Butler is still to repeat his success in 300. 2/10

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