F. Gary Gray has brought us such titles as The Italian Job with Mark Wahlberg and A Man Apart with Vin Diesel, now he teams up with Kurt Wimmer, the man who gave us Ultraviolet and Equilibrium, to bring us Law Abiding Citizen, a film where Jamie Foxx plays a cunt and Gerard Butler is an innocent man who gets revenge on the people who unnecessarily murdered his family.
From the outset it's clear that Butler is our hero, he's the man that got screwed over by the system to keep Foxx's record in perfect order, so 10 years later when Foxx has a family and Butler goes about delivering a lethal injection that's rather painful. Given it's less than 24 hours since the Washington Sniper was executed, the scene was rather brutal and interesting to watch, like the opening where a fat man stabs Butler and his wife in a shockingly frank manner reminiscent of Zodiac.
Sadly when Butler gets to torturing the fat man, paralysed but not numbed, filming as he severs limbs and such, we see a deranged build up deliciously evil, but no pay off. Even when the daughter of Foxx watches it, it's all sound effects, no images, and the man's head lying on a worktop without any signs of it being a human head. Come the last hour all the build up from Butler becomes a series of gunshots, similar to Harry Brown, it's same old same old, nothing new, and then, annoying of all, it turns out we're meant to be on the side of Jamie Foxx, I'm rarely on his side, ever.
The acting is superb from Butler, he's fun and dark, and he has more funny moments here than the whole of The Ugly Truth, Foxx is annoyingly shit, everyone else gets nothing to do, and the whole film seems to be an exercise in build-up and futility, which is a real shame, as it could have been a violent but fun vigilante revenge justice flick.
5/10
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