Travesty of justice

Law Abiding Citizenis a
cinematically and morally incoherent thriller

BEEFCAKE WITH BALONEY: Gerard Butler

by MALCOLM FRASER

A legal thriller of sorts set in Philadelphia, Law Abiding Citizen is a mash-up of high-tech actioner, vigilante flick and sketchy morality play à la Seven. Gerard Butler is Clyde, a loving husband and father whose wife and daughter are brutally killed in a home invasion. Jamie Foxx is Nick, Butler’s blustery, careerist attorney, who cuts a plea-bargain deal with one of the killers to send the other to death row. Ten years later, Butler embarks on a blood-soaked campaign to not only avenge his family’s deaths, but attack the justice system that he feels has been poisoned with compromise and moral relativism.

Director F. Gary Gray, a veteran of hip hop videos who also helmed the Italian Job remake a few years back, presides over a strange pastiche where clichés and sappy sentimentality collide with brutality and Riefenstahl-worthy audience manipulation. In the first half-hour alone, we’re treated to melodramatic character development, a gun-blazing chase scene, a little torture porn and an egregious montage where Foxx’s daughter’s cello recital is ham-handedly intercut with a lethal injection.

To Gray and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer’s credit, the ensuing story is exciting and unpredictable up to a point, but then collapses into implausible nonsense when the time comes to reveal its central twist. As for the lead actors, Butler was great yelling about Spartans in 300, but his quality control is on the fritz (either that or my opinion of him is forever soured by his participation in P.S. I Love You), and Foxx continues his post-Oscar rut with a leading-man-on-autopilot performance.

I hesitate to judge movies from a moralistic point of view, preferring to leave that to politically correct harpies. That said, the film is like a microcosm of just how utterly fucked-up the U.S. of A’s moral compass is today. Explicitly addressing the country’s justice system, Wimmer’s script seems to suggest that society faces a choice between Cheney-esque authoritarianism and violent nihilism, but that would be giving it credit for a coherence it doesn’t really have. Ultimately the film is pretty terrible, but in a way that’s almost heavy—like something that perhaps future historians will study as they puzzle over the bizarre times we live in.

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN
OPENS THIS FRIDAY, OCT. 16