Of all the emotions Gerard Butler had to portray in this film, shame probably came more naturally than most.
Director: F. Gary Gray
Writer: Kurt Wimmer
Stars: Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx and Leslie Bibb
Gerard Butler plays Clyde Shelton (whose name I don’t like because he sounds like a 1950’s private eye), a devoted father and husband whose life is shattered when, totally out of the blue and without any explanation anywhere in the film, he is attacked in his home by a pair of archetypal ne’er-do-wells, who stab him and leave him for dead before raping and murdering his wife and murdering his daughter. After surviving the attack (an oversight that the murderers probably should’ve dealt with) Clyde then sees one of his assailants, the one who seemingly did all the raping and murdering, get off with a minimal prison sentence after agreeing to testify in court against his fellow attacker. This makes Clyde very unhappy and as a result he goes on a meticulously orchestrated and ridiculously intricate killing spree with the aim of murdering everyone associated with the case – oh, did I mention that in his past life he just happened to be some kind of James Bond/Jack Bauer/Rambo/Superman who, it turns out, is the most intelligent and deadly man on the planet? No, well, apparently he is. Carnage ensues.
I don’t really know where to start with this film. First off, I think both the death of a child, and particularly a child’s murder, and rape are two extremely emotive acts and putting them both in right at the start of the film really put me off from the first five minutes. One or the other would be enough to ruin someone’s life, the two together are unnecessary. I watched it thinking that the writer must’ve sat down, pen in hand, thinking: “What can I do to make Clyde really, really pissed... Let’s have him stabbed up real nice, oh, yeah, and we’ll have his wife killed – no, wait, raped and killed – yeah that’s good, oh and let’s just throw in his child - no, daughter, even better - being murdered in front of him. Yeah, that’ll really piss him off.” Less is more. If they wanted they could’ve shot that scene much more affectively and then put a subtitle for American viewers: [Clyde is having a bad day].
The film is also morally corrupt. It says that the murder of a man’s wife and child is horrible and encourages you to support the systematic torture and murder of the men responsible. It’s fine when films challenge your ethics, and I quite like that about this film, but it refuses to acknowledge that it is even a dilemma for Clyde. The closest the film comes to the issue is when the policeman investigating Clyde’s murders (Jamie Foxx) asks him what his wife and children would’ve thought of his action, which Clyde thinks about for a beat and then shrugs off, saying something along the lines of: “They can’t think, they’re dead.” Deep.
The most irritating thing about Law Abiding Citizen is that actually it is pretty clever in parts, but those clever parts are over emphasised by the director, as if he is saying: “Hey, did you see that? Look at how clever I am!”
Sometimes when you get two big Hollywood actors working together on a film they will push each other and their performances improve as a result, in this film, I think Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx just gave up.
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