Climbing Higher Pictures

Law Abiding Citizen Review

By Ryan Hamelin

Movie: B-

Where to begin… First off, if you’re planning on seeing the film, avoid watching any of the trailers and TV spots. They give away the whole movie… in chronological order. If you decide you weren’t going to see this anyway, feel free to watch the trailer and save yourself some time and money. I’m not saying that it isn’t worth seeing on a big screen, just that the marketing team ended up revealing the whole plot in order to get people into the theater and that definitely broke cardinal thriller rule #1.

I know, now you want to hear what cardinal thriller rule #2 is. Well that’d be having a great script, in this case penned by Kurt Wimmer, director of Equilibrium and Ultraviolet. I’m usually not a fan of wholesale script rewrites or bringing in other writers to “polish” things for no reason, but Overture could have done with a bit of ghost writing here. About halfway through the film the dialogue takes a turn for the cheesy, and otherwise incredibly well orchestrated and tension building scenes start to lose their emotional impact on the audience. Unintentional laughter could be heard frequently through the latter half of the film, and while it made the experience more entertaining, it definitely wasn’t in the way the filmmakers intended.

Cardinal thriller rule break #3, they did a better job casting their villain than their hero. Don’t get me wrong, I like Jamie Foxx a lot. I think he completely deserved his Oscar for Ray, and he’s consistently a performer worth keeping an eye on. It’s too bad that he can’t hold his weight against Gerard Butler on a scene-by-scene basis, allowing Leonidas to steal the entire film. Despite dramatic music cues and attempts to slant Butler’s actions as maniacal or horrifying, the audience is rooting for him to succeed far more than Foxx, and it is a testament to Butler’s acting ability that he garners that kind of sympathy for such a vengeful character. This is his movie, and he knows it, making full use of his star power and intimidating presence to force Jamie Foxx into steadily more compromising situations. We never question his motives, partially because they are set up so brutally in the opening scene, and as the dead bodies pile up, the audience can’t help but bask in a sense of twisted accomplishment at the looks of bewilderment on the lawyer team faces. Does he have an accomplice? How does he keep killing people? What is his actual history? Who’s going to die next? All these questions do get answered, but the reality is far more preposterous than anything you could make up on your own.

In a lot of ways, Law Abiding Citizen feels like a concerted effort to advance the thriller genre onto a new plateau of character dynamics mixed with explosive consequences. It is inevitably undone by a final reveal which is neither satisfying nor plausible, leaving an incredible build-up waiting for a significant payoff. The preachy moral lessons get steadily more cliché as the film wears on, and while the opening salvos about justice and truth ring painfully true, making sure Foxx gets to his kid’s cello recital wasn’t worth the screen time. Explosions are also plentiful in this one, and under the direction by F. Gary Gray, the man behind The Italian Job, they feel appropriately devastating and plot worthy. Regrettably, from a character perspective, Jamie Foxx never manages to seem all that distressed as people he knows continue to die all around him and each scene following a death has him perfectly calm and presentable once more as though nothing had happened at all. I don’t know if the quiet moments were simply edited out, or if they were never filmed, but it’s hard for us to even take the violence seriously when nobody else seems to mind. The final conclusion… Law Abiding Citizen had the look and the feel of a competent thriller, but gets weighed down by a host of issues even Butler’s stellar performance can’t assuage.