If you’ve read any of my other reviews, you might have picked up that I quite like action films. If you haven’t, allow me to explain; I quite like action films. That is to say Die Hard is my favourite film of all time, and Crank is the best action film of recent years bar none. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have extensive tastes, it just means that my tolerance for terrible Hollywood tripe is pretty high*. I will actively seek out films that look like they are going to be so-bad-they’re-good. Which is why the Jamie Foxx/Gerard Butler vehicle Law Abiding Citizen appealed to me. The trailers made it look really awful, and one reviewer described it as the ‘ultimate popcorn movie’, whatever that means. I was prepared for my thumbs to be thoroughly erect in appreciation.

Sadly Law Abiding Citizen falls at the first hurdle, and then continues on down the track limping and bleeding and tripping over every subsequent obstacle with embarrassing commitment. In short, this is an action film that spoils everything by attempting to moralise its vengeful message and bring into question the American legal system, which apparently lets guilty people go free all the time. Makes you wonder why America’s prisons are so full…

It opens with Gerard Butler’s family man doing a bit of light soldering of an evening, whilst his young daughter makes rubbish bracelets next to him. A knock at the door comes, and as Butler opens it two crooks break in, bearing the tattoos and facial foliage that identifies them as the ever-evil blue collar scum that is always responsible for Middle America’s problems in Hollywood movies†. They tie up Butler, kill and rape his wife and then kill his daughter. Butler survives, the burglars get put on trial and Jamie Foxx prosecutes. In a plea bargain engineered by Foxx the main culprit goes free for grassing up his mate, resulting in death row for the less guilty of the two. Butler is understandably miffed.

Cut to ten years later, and Foxx is even more successful than before. But as he watches the man he convicted of the murders get the lethal injection, so begins a trail of gruesome and violent acts of revenge perpetrated by Butler. His character proceeds to kill his way through the long list of people who he believes did not administer a proportional amount of justice after the murder of his family. Conveniently enough it turns out that Butler was not just an ordinary law abiding citizen, as the title suggests, but a murdering genius. His talents were previously employed by the US military to engineer clever assassinations of which Saw’s protagonist would be proud.

It’s at this point that things get incredibly messy. If we were supposed to empathise with Butler for his loss at the beginning, it becomes impossible to maintain this feeling once he is revealed as a psychopathic murderer. It’s also impossible to feel for Foxx’s character, who was willing to put a high conviction rate above the chance at real justice for his clients. By the film’s conclusion it seems as though Butler was just trying to teach Foxx a valuable lesson about ethics in criminal law. That his chosen method of instruction is the systematic murder of all his friends and co-workers becomes a bit of a sticky issue. Because of all the blood.

So plot-wise things look bad. This is an 18, though if you were expecting to see graphic violence, you might be a little disappointed. There are one or two over-the-top blood-lettings, but I got the feeling that the censors felt the message of this film was just too nasty to merit a lower classification. And I agree with them.

If you want to watch an hour and a half long uninformed rant about the justice system in the US, go and see Law Abiding Citizen. Comparisons to Harry Brown are possible. The one highlight was the truly terrible performance by the actor playing the mayor of Philadelphia‡. She’s provides comic relief in an otherwise joyless film.

*I’m not calling Die Hard tripe, but most other action films fall into this category.

†See Ransom, Panic Room, Home Alone, Under Siege, Falling Down, Straw Dogs, Natural Born Killers and many more that I can’t think of right now.

‡It’s arbitrarily set in Philadelphia.