Gary Gray ( Friday, The Italian Job) spent the last decade studying movies like Death Wish, the Saw series, The Brave One, Untraceable and other examples of revenge gorenography. Shelton is put in prison, and that's where the murder games begin in earnest.Īpparently Shelton and director F. He executes the killers in approved mad-scientist fashion one by remote control in prison, the other by surgically removing precious body parts and injecting him with "poison from the liver of a Caribbean puffer fish" and, when the police arrive, strips naked to greet them, as if he were Leonidas facing the Persians at Thermopylae. Outraged and embittered, Shelton lies low for 10 years, then activates a revenge scheme that is both madly complex and simply mad. One is condemned to death the other gets a light sentence. The two killers are arrested, but assistant DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), who's wary of trying a case he might lose, cuts a deal, letting one perp testify against the other. (See pictures from Nigeria's budding film industry.)Ĭlyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is the mild, happily married Philadelphian who's forced to watch his family's atrocity up close. Then again, neither does the drearily sadistic Law Abiding Citizen. But that heroic restraint wouldn't make for a good movie. They would answer Bernard Shaw's question to the 1988 Democratic candidate for President "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?" in Michael Dukakis' measured tone, putting principle above vengeance. In real life, good men may try to gulp down the black bile of their devastation and move on.
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After that, any transgression, including wholesale murder, is understandable. The current recipe, cooked up in last year's Death Race and this week's Law Abiding Citizen, is to have some malefactor slaughter the leading character's wife and child the love of his life and his hope for the future as he watches helplessly. So let's have him kill two 6-year-olds.' " "What I hate in movies I mean action movies is, 'We need the audience to really hate the bad guy. "I think that's the cheap and ugly way out," he said. I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.Follow in 2000, Steve Martin was talking about the hack writer's trick of getting sympathy for one character by making another one a total rotter. LAW ABIDING CITIZEN is better than its disappointing ending. Shelton is clearly an anti-hero in this story, but the ending makes you feel as if political correctness prevailed in spite of everything that goes before it. They know that he did it, but he is locked up, and they can’t stop him. In fact, after a surprising turn of events in prison, Shelton is put into solitary confinement, and the killings still continue, each one more elaborate than the previous one. However, Shelton lets himself get caught, is tried and sent to prison, but the killings still continue even though Shelton is behind bars.
#Law abiding citizen ending trial#
Shelton makes clear that he is determined to kill everyone who was involved in the trial of the killers, and he gets revenge on Darby in more ways than one. The execution doesn’t go as planned, it is definitely not painless, and the authorities figure out that Shelton was responsible. Then it is 10 years later, the convicted killer is about to be executed, and we get a not-so-clever cross-cutting scene between the execution and a cello recital by Rice’s young daughter.
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Shelton is extremely disappointed that the second killer, Darby, is going to live, and he doesn’t feel any better when Rice tells him, “Some justice is better than no justice at all.” However, after the two men are caught and put on trial, Nick Rice, the prosecuting attorney played by Jamie Foxx, makes a deal with one of the killers and spares his life in exchange for the man’s testimony against his partner in order to improve Rice’s conviction rate, which is an astounding 96 percent. Gerard Butler plays Clyde Shelton, an engineer whose wife and daughter are brutally murdered by two men who burst into their home one evening. However, knowing Hollywood, don’t be surprised if the inevitable DVD of the film comes out with the obligatory “alternate ending” which should have been the one released into theaters in the first place. LAW ABIDING CITIZEN is a thriller with a theme about revenge, it has good execution, fine special effects, but a lousy ending that doesn’t satisfy what has gone before it as much as it seems to be tacked on just to please the sensibilities of certain audiences.