Un honnête citoyen

I never rooted for Jamie Fox's character, I wanted Butler to kill everyone. The director failed to make me see Butler as a villain. If that was the intention, it didn't mesh. Fun movie though.

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN has all the trademarks of a great film. A non-linear plot, plenty to say about the state of the world today, some tough performances and explosive sequences. Best of all, it blurs the line between good and evil so that you're never quite sure who you're supposed to root for, which guy's the villain and which guy's the hero.

Gerard Butler stars as the ordinary man whose family is killed in a burglary gone wrong. Butler then undergoes a startling transformation as he sets up a campaign of revenge against all those who failed to bring the killers to justice. The film goes from there, starting off dark and becoming increasingly more bleak as the running time goes on.

It has plenty of incident to keep it running along, and some great scenes: Butler's manipulation of the prison regulations, for instance, or the way he manages to wage his vendetta from the INTERIOR of his prison cell. But, along the way, the film's sense of realism diminishes until we end up with a completely ludicrous event at the end which is designed to bring closure. It's not on par with, say, EAGLE EYE for suspension of disbelief, but it's getting there. It's just a shame, as with some tighter writing this could have been a truly great movie. It turns out to be an intriguing oddity, instead.

Butler is good as the 'bad guy', effectively channelling some of that Leonidas rage. But, as usual, Jamie Foxx is completely out of his depth as the lawyer. He's a vacuum of talent, an empty space in the middle of the movie surrounded by other, better, more seasoned performers. It's a shame, as the combination of rubbish actor and rubbish ending scupper this movie's best intentions.

This reminds me of the start of a great relationship, starts out wonderful, continues to grow, and then out of nowhere, BAM, it ends and you are left wondering what just happened.

As so many other reviewers have stated, it starts out with great suspense, originality, and creativity, and somewhere in the last 20 minutes, you are left wondering, did it really just end that way? Ouch! I found myself incredibly disappointed.

We all love Jaime Foxx's funny side, but really wanted to see something else happen to him in this film. I get the idea of the end, that he learned his lesson so to speak, but it was still really weak for what it could have been.

However, I'll still give it an 8 as it kept me quite intrigued throughout...so hard to find these days in a quality film.

Let's face it. Because a person is capable of pulling off the kinds of things done here, doesn't make the likelihood any greater. There is so much precision and luck involved in making things work that it would take a god pulling strings to allow these things to fall so easily into place. Even a silent partner is not going to do the job. I enjoyed the setup but the lengths gone through for revenge really pull it apart for me. The guy has so much power that he is completely in control. There would be a point in law enforcement where they would finally say, "Screw you!" The technology would have taken a fortune beyond imagination to work out. While I like the actors in this film, I can't recommend it's far fetched totality. Done in a more controlled and believable way, you have a stunner. It's just too much. And the ending is a real weakness.

"Law Abiding Citizen" starts out like a modern-day version of "Death Wish," spends a few moments aping the "Saw" franchise, then settles in as a cat-and-mouse crime drama centered around the theme that the American legal system seems designed as much to thwart justice as to enact it.

The movie stands firmly in the long tradition of wish-fulfillment fantasies in which the victim of a broken legal system - functioning as a stand-in for an equally frustrated and helpless audience - finally says enough is enough and takes matters into his own hands, even going outside the limits of the law, if that's what it takes, to achieve justice.

As with the Charles Bronson character in "Death Wish," Gerard Butler's Clyde Shelton witnesses his wife and daughter being brutally raped and murdered by a couple of armed intruders. When the worst of the perpetrators cops a plea and is back out on the streets after a mere three years behind bars, Clyde is forced to take matters into his own hands. But he isn't content merely to bring down the killers themselves but to systematically go after everyone in the legal system – from strict-constructionist judges to hamstrung attorneys - who helped facilitate the injustice. That's where Nick Rice, well played by Jamie Foxx, comes in, the decent but by-the-book prosecutor who helped set up the deal and has now, along with everyone else involved with the case, become a prime target for Clyde's take-no-prisoners reign of terror and retribution.

The one thing that distinguishes "Law Abiding Citizen" from similar films in the genre is that it's not afraid to have a deeply troubled, possibly even psychotic, character at its core. For Clyde does not fit the mold of the typically lovable antihero. The audience is, in the early stages at least, asked to root him on as a conventional Angel of Retribution dispensing the justice that the court system saw fit to deny him, but so much of what he winds up doing steps so far over the line that we eventually balk at his tactics. It's this moral ambiguity that helps to mitigate some of the implausibility of Kurt Wimmer's screenplay, which often goes for effect at the expense of credibility. Indeed the movie's insistence at making him a sort of omnipotent, omnipresent existential force of nature to be reckoned with takes the movie out of the realm of reality and cheapens some of what it is trying to do. And, in the process of reaching its climax, the movie takes a plot turn so ludicrous and credibility-defying that the whole thing pretty much crashes and burns at the end.

That being said, Nick's interactions with Clyde are fun to watch and, thanks to taut direction by F. Gary Gray, there are some moments of genuine suspense scattered along the way. So if you can put your skepticism and critical-thinking skills on hold for the duration, you can have a pretty decent time with "Law Abiding Citizen."