Law Abiding Citizen opens with a home invasion that is meant to be unbearable, and it is. Two men break into Clyde Shelton’s Philadelphia house. Rupert Ames ties and gags him. Clarence Darby stabs him in the stomach, then rapes and murders his wife and daughter while he lies there. That is the wound the film never stops picking at, and it is also the only thing the film gets fully right.
Trailer, via overturefilms.
Nick Rice and the Plea Bargain
Jamie Foxx plays Nick Rice, the prosecutor assigned to the case. He worries about his conviction rate. The evidence is thin, so he cuts a deal: Darby pleads guilty to third-degree murder, gets three years, and testifies against Ames, who takes felony murder and a death sentence. Clyde begs him not to make the deal. Nick does it anyway. Darby thanks Nick at a press conference and shakes his hand while Clyde watches. That handshake is the engine of everything that follows, and Kurt Wimmer’s script knows it.
Clyde Shelton Waits Ten Years
Gerard Butler plays Clyde as a man holding still. A decade passes. Ames expresses remorse but insists he did not commit the murders. He is executed by lethal injection, the drugs swapped for an anticonvulsant, and he dies in agony. Then Darby gets an anonymous warning call, flees his apartment with a hostage who turns out to be Clyde in disguise, and is paralyzed by tetrodotoxin-laced spikes hidden in the gun’s handle. Clyde straps him to a table and records the killing.
Justice at any cost.
That tagline is the film’s whole argument, and the film never bothers to interrogate it.
A Villain With a Workshop
Clyde is arrested after Darby’s remains turn up in a warehouse he owns. He represents himself at his bail hearing before Judge Laura Burch, who presided over the original plea deal. He threatens Nick’s daughter Denise by mailing her a copy of Darby’s murder. From there the film becomes a series of escalating set pieces in which Clyde, somehow, kills people from inside a cell. F. Gary Gray directs with competence and no particular interest. Colm Meaney’s Detective Dunnigan and Bruce McGill’s DA Jonas Cantrell are given almost nothing to do. Regina Hall is wasted as Kelly Rice.
The Cast Deserves Better
The performances are the one thing holding this together. Butler is genuinely unsettling in the quiet scenes, and Foxx plays Nick as a man who made a reasonable choice and cannot stop paying for it. Viola Davis appears as the Mayor of Philadelphia, and the film has no idea what to do with her. Leslie Bibb, Michael Irby, Gregory Itzin, Christian Stolte and Annie Corley fill out a cast that is stronger than the material.
What the Film Is Actually Saying
Nothing coherent. Law Abiding Citizen wants to be a revenge thriller and a critique of the criminal justice system at the same time, and it commits to neither. Clyde’s grievance is real. The plea bargain that freed Darby is the kind of deal that happens every day. But the film keeps escalating until Clyde is less a man than a machine with a body count, and the question of whether he is right dissolves into noise. The premise is strong. The execution is not.
The Numbers
Overture Films released Law Abiding Citizen in the United States on October 16, 2009. It ran 109 minutes. Reviews were negative, though critics generally credited the cast. It grossed $127.9 million against a $53 million production budget, which is a real return, and it was nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Action or Adventure Film at the 36th Saturn Awards. None of that changes what the film is.
Our Verdict
Law Abiding Citizen has a good first act, a strong cast and a premise worth taking seriously. It also has nowhere to go. The film mistakes escalation for argument, and by the time Clyde is running a killing operation from a prison cell, the movie has stopped being about anything except itself. This is a waste of Butler and Foxx, and a waste of a question that American movies rarely ask out loud.
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