Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/23/09
There has, to my knowledge,
never been a positive movie plea bargain. By their very nature, they
fall somewhere between Uncinematic and Unamerican, and I know John Wayne
would never have signed off on one. The District Attorneys of 70's
and 80's cop movies tended to treat plea agreements as excuses to let the
guilty off scot-free for no good reason other than their own stinkin' civil
libertarianism. Kind of like a form of diplomatic immunity for those
lacking the good fortune to be diplomats. Then, the 90's and 00's
became such a dry time for cinematic DA deal-cutting, you'd think Dirty
Harry had gotten a law degree. But fear not, fans of prosecutorial
injustice: the Evil Plea Bargain returns with a vengeance (does it
ever!) in Law Abiding Citizen, in which Gerard Butler portrays an
angry crime victim whose reaction to one of the men who murdered his family
Getting Away With It makes King Leonidas look positively Soft on Madness.
The point of the screenplay by the ever-demonstrative Kurt Wimmer is maddeningly
elusive, and after a while he runs out of ghoulish tricks to keep the plates
spinning. But it's a tour de force for Butler, and it's not every
day you see a man murdered with a spork.
Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler)
seems like a normal guy, enjoying another happy day at home with his wife
(Brooke Stacy Mills) and daughter (Ksenia Hulayev) when two home invaders
break down their door. Rupert Ames (Josh Stewart) is your run-of-the-mill
violent burglar, but Clarance Darby (Christian Stole) is a stone cold maniac
who rapes and murders both of the Shelton women after knocking Clyde cold.
The case falls to Prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), who prides himself
on his political ambitions and near-perfect conviction record. When
the DNA is tossed out due to a contaminated crime scene, he decides leaning
on Clyde's testimony is too risky and cuts a deal with Darby, who lies
and shifts all his own blame to Ames. Ames gets a death sentence
and Darby gets a couple years in jail while an enraged Clyde is left to
look on in shock at the sight of Nick and one of the killers shaking hands
in front of the courthouse. Flash forward ten years and Nick has
only continued to ascend at the District Attorney's office, to the detriment
of his absentee relationships with his wife (Regina Hall) and daughter
(Emerald-Angel Young). He agrees, along with colleague Sarah Lowell
(Leslie Bibb), who handled the actual trial, to attend the execution of
Ames, which goes horribly awry. Turns out those chemicals designed
to make a lethal injection painless were replaced by ones that had the
opposite effect. Nick begins an investigation that quickly leads
to Darby, but the killer is already in communication with a mysterious
voice on his phone that guides him away from the cops. Instead, it
leads him directly into the clutches of Clyde, who uses a cleverly hidden
drug to paralyze him. Darby dies slowly and horribly on land Clyde
owns, so it doesn't take long at all for the cops to turn up on his doorstep.
Once he's behind bars, the grieving father reveals that he's only begun
to kill the people he blames for the miscarriage of justice, and soon no
one who laid a finger on the Darby/Ames case is safe. But how is
a man locked away in solitary reaching out into the outside world to wreck
vengeance? And is there anything Nick can do to stop him before his
own appeals run out?
There are bits and pieces
of great ideas lying all over Law Abiding Citizen, but it's hard
to imaging just how any of them could have been developed given the concept.
Wimmer scores some good points on the fact that too many life-and-death
jobs are being done by people indifferently looking to advance their own
ambitions, but Nick's journey from self-centered to self-righteous isn't
exactly compelling. Bibb and Bruce McGill, who plays his boss, get
pretty good scenes that allow them to regret their own clock-punching role
in creating the Monster that is Clyde, but Nick remains frustratingly above
his own responsibility. All the while, Clyde seems ready to kill
the guy who printed the paper the plea bargain was written on, but doesn't
seem to factor actually offing the guy who CUT the deal into his Machiavellian
scheme. All the better to “teach” him, although the lesson isn't
so much a lesson at all as a sound bite that has little relevance to what
the killer is actually doing. I struggled to make sense of a thread
in Clyde's clever plans that would allow people to survive if they just
“played by the rules”. One character is poisoned when trying to kill
someone else; another dies because someone else doesn't keep their word,
and a third would have survived if she thought a rule she made applied
to her as well as everyone else. But what exactly does that mean?
And why isn't everyone's death similarly ironic (“Poor girl, she
kept saying she was going to get a hybrid, and now Clyde put a bomb on
her old gas guzzler!”)? Even once we've passed the point of learning
that our Law Abiding Citizen is in fact a former Spook's Spook from the
CIA, the final revelations of how he executed his master plan go beyond
unbelievable to settle somewhere on the opposite side of the laws of physics
(how much noise would that plan have made? And NO ONE heard it???).
While the plot doesn't work,
this is one seriously demented exercise in extreme violence. Wimmer
gave the world the Gun Kata fighting style in his masterful Equilibrium
and a swordfight in the dark between two characters brandishing flaming
weapons in Ultraviolet, so if there's any man to give you an exploding
cell phone and the aforementioned spork incident, it would be him.
I will literally never look at that three-pronged quasi-spoon as anything
other than an implement of death. But the movie is too grounded in
reality to approach the mania of those earlier films (both of which he
directed), and thus his trademark disconnect from the believable becomes
a serious issue once we hit the third act. Director F. Gary Grey
boasts among his credits The Italian Job, which is one of the best-directed
modern action movies, and he does generate some snarky energy for a while
before the movie starts to collapse under the weight of its plot.
Foxx pretty much plays the
role as written, but the actor and character do each other no favors.
It's a role that probably shouldn't have been played by a traditional leading
man, since it's got an officious odiousness built in that would have played
better coming from someone less handsome and stalwart. Butler's in
what 300 revealed to be his wheelhouse: mad
dog mania. Clyde isn't so much a character as a series of actions,
but he performs those actions with so much gusto that it's easy to forgive
a man who studied an entire library full of legal texts so he could throw
around some Law & Order jargon and cite one precedent in court.
And he wields a MEAN spork! It's no coincidence that the air starts
to go out of the movie once it's got him so firmly locked away that he
can't do anything else interesting until we've learned the secret to his
long-distance homicide trick. Colm Meaney is called upon to be a
bit of a mad dog himself as the cop whose incompetence got that DNA tossed
out but who also bears no shame. McGill is his usual charming, reliable
self, and Bibb has some great moments as the one member of Nick's office
who almost cares about people.
Law Abiding Citizen
works for a while, then slowly slips away under a pall of simultaneously
escalating preposterousness and boredom. But it should accomplish
its' job of making people think twice before signing off on another stinkin'
plea bargain. Or reaching for a spork. |
