Original title: Law Abiding Citizen (Unrated)
Year 2009
Duration: 109 min.
Country: United States
Directed by: F. Gary Gray
Screenplay: Kurt Wimmer
With: Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Leslie Bibb, Colm Meaney, Bruce McGill, Gregory Itzin, Viola Davis, Michael Kelly
Grade 7
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Law Abiding Citizen (2009) - HD Trailer
Spoiler Alert: I am going to tell you the beginning, the middle and the end of a movie that you have surely seen and forgotten for more than a decade.
Law Abiding Citizen (2009) is a film with an interesting premise, a not-so-heroic hero (Jamie Foxx) and a leading anti-hero (Gerard Butler) who draws us into his position. Unfortunately, it's also a movie with a forced twist and ending to maintain Hollywood's political correctness.
The history. A couple of creeps enter Clyde Shelton's (Butler) home and one of them kills his wife and daughter. Eventually both are brought to justice, but the case falls into the hands of Assistant District Attorney Nick Rice (Foxx), who, in order not to lower his win rate, makes a deal with one of the criminals to ensure that imprison the other Shelton tries to convince Rice to accuse both of them and not just one, but Rice only thinks about their numbers and that is how the murderer goes free and blames everything on the other, who is sentenced to death on a date of decide. So who goes free is the rapist and murderer, one Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte). Yes, yes, the wife was also raped while killing her. The other, Rupert Ames (Josh Stewart), was more of a voyeur than anything else, which is just as bad, but compared to Darby he was a little baby.
Ten years pass and we are already on the day of Ames's execution, by lethal injection. It's supposed to be a painless death, but someone changes the poison to a stronger one, and so the condemned man dies in horrible convulsions. Some words written on the jar lead the police to Darby, but it's all part of Shelton's far-fetched plan, who was the one who changed the jars and now takes advantage of the situation to kidnap the killer, who is taken to an abandoned shed to mutilate. and torture him to his liking.
The police find the remains of the depraved, which has been divided into 25 pieces for easy storage, and now yes, the trail points to Shelton, who is arrested and meets Rice again but this time on the other side of the counter. This is all part of Shelton's plan, who has had ten years to prepare and play cat-and-mouse with the assistant DA, whether or not he's behind bars. The deaths, violence and revenge of Clyde Shelton continue, without Rice being able to do anything.
To make matters worse, not only does Shelton have enough money to finance his activities, but the guy happens to be a retired spy whose specialty is remote assassination, so things look bleak for Rice and his colleagues. Shelton does and undoes from his jail cell, using exploding phones, reprogrammed traffic robots to kill, and the ever-popular chunk of C4 under your car. The only way to stop him would be to enter his cell and shoot him off the head, which is what one of his former colleagues suggests.
The problem with the film is the hero, who fails to generate empathy and is, at best, a secondary character, and at worst, an unsympathetic, pedantic and selfish subject who does not finish learning the most elementary lessons about Justice. Jamie Foxx acts it out as Jamie Foxx angry. Nor does it help that Gerard Butler has, from the first minutes, the sympathy of the public. They kill his wife and daughter, and you have to be made of stone not to empathize with him. What's more, before her daughter dies, she makes him a bracelet with the word "daddy" that Butler will bring out every time he needs the viewer to shed a tear. You step into his shoes from the start, and there's no way Foxx can compete with that, let alone the way his character is written.
The movie is entertaining, suspenseful, with a bit of action and some stunts that would make Batman proud. Yes, the ending is shoehorned in, as if to emphasize that Shelton is a nutcase (which he is, but not on that scale) and Rice a nice guy (which he isn't), but the rest of the footage is fine. Do you get to see the movie again? It depends on tastes, but I see it once every year or two, always siding with Shelton.
The unrated version contains a cute shot of Darby's severed and mutilated head.