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As written by Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium) and directed by F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job), it starts out welcoming the moral ambiguity that comes when a father (Gerard Butler) is forced to watch one of two thugs who murdered his wife and daughter walk free when his assistant district attorney (Jamie Foxx) makes a deal ensuring that the other will get the death penalty, lest they both walk due to circumstantial evidence. Ten years later, a certain execution goes botched while a second thug is found dismembered; Butler is willingly taken into police custody and begins arranging deals with Foxx in exchange for the lives of those in the legal system who helped botch justice a decade earlier. After all, if he was willing to make deals with murderers then, surely he’d still be game to extend the same courtesy to a citizen scorned…

Alas, vengeance soon gives way to violence, and Law Abiding Citizen succumbs to its baser crowd-pleasing desires; if it were merely Jigsaw Goes to Court from the get-go, a grittier B-movie reveling in its elaborate bloodshed, Citizen might’ve been better off for it. But from its ‘who’s really right?’ opening all the way down to its Constitution-shredding climax, Gray and friends genuinely think that they’re making an Important Film About Serious Issues, a scathing indictment of a flawed justice system that’s really only being exploited for the sake of exploitation fare. It’s a film that thrives on the hypocrisy of describing in detail how Butler will go about (and has gone about) dispatching the freed criminal, but holds back from showing the actual mutilation, only to turn around and graphically kill off a judge and a prisoner in short order.

And from there on out, things are only fun in the sense of how far-fetched they can get. The early suspense of watching Butler’s schemes unfold from behind bars gives way to the last-act impatience of waiting for Wimmer’s plotting to unravel, as Butler spouts proverbs and Foxx gives steely-eyed assurances that no one else will die. But isn’t that way we’re here, Jamie? Your hot-shot attorney’s not about to learn a lesson, so let’s let the long-time mentor and good-hearted colleague meet their respective ends before you decide to draw a line between a good guy committing a righteous murder and a bad guy doing the same.

In the end, formula abides above all else in 'Law Abiding Citizen'. It’s a revenge thriller that tries to filter out all the pulp and doesn’t always succeed; if only they had left it all in, it might have seemed more justified when they let it all out.

link directly to this review at https://www.efilmcritic.com/review.php?movie=18523&reviewer=409
originally posted: 10/17/09 05:53:19
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