Wow, this is good! Oh wait, no it's not. For about 45 minutes, Law Abiding Citizen seems to be living up to its promise as a taut action flick. An inventor named Clyde (Gerard Butler) sees his family brutally killed during a home invasion. Ambitious deputy DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) cuts a deal with the viler of the murderers, and lets him walk. Ten years later, Clyde (who's a far more complicated and resourceful man than anyone realizes) begins wreaking havoc on now-District Attorney Nick via an elaborate, ultra-violent scheme that he manages to orchestrate even while he's in police custody. The setup is clever -- the bad guy has a sympathetic motive, and the victim is a self-serving political animal who brought it on himself. But if you're foolish enough to think that a mainstream Hollywood picture would allow for that sort of complex plotting, think again.
It would be nice if Hollywood directors trusted the audience a little more. There's a solid, grown-up suspense thriller at the movie's foundation, a gritty, violent story about justice, revenge and fairness. Which is why it's so frustrating when, about halfway through the film, it becomes clear that director F. Gary Gray (A Man Apart) and screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (Ultraviolet) are steering the story toward a pat, trite conclusion. Watching Law Abiding Citizen is a little like reading a Reader's Digest condensed version of a Chuck Palahniuk novel - you can see the bones of a really great, edgy story, but all the rough edges have been sanded away so that you, the dumb viewer, won't have to do too much hard thinkin'.
In another time, this might have been awesome. Had Law Abiding Citizen been made in the 1970s, the era of classic Charles Bronson revenge dramas, it might have been something more satisfying. Filmmakers in those days were allowed, nay, encouraged to create complex, emotionally ambivalent characters, with good guys who weren't lily-white, and bad guys who had understandable reasons for their mayhem. But, alas, Law Abiding Citizen was made in 2009, when test marketing dictates that movies must have tidy endings, and no ambiguity that might confuse the common denominator. So Foxx's character is made out to be an almost flawlessly great guy, and it's a deus ex machina plot contrivance via e-mail sent by an off-screen character, of all things, that trips up Clyde's impeccably crafted plot.
Why do movies like this always have to turn stupid? What begins as an extremely smart, compelling thrill ride becomes, in the hands of Gray and Wimmer, so increasingly ludicrous that, finally, it's impossible to stay invested in Clyde's scheme. The fascinating, even scary, psychological thriller becomes just another movie about a villain with illogically vast resources and an apparently magical pre-knowledge of every move his opponents will make. Add in a vast swath of sheer, dumb coincidence, and what could have been a great thriller turns into another predictable potboiler with a standard-issue conclusion.