In the quiet of evening, the home of Shelton (Gerard Butler), a modest engineer, devoted husband, and father to a wonderful child, is invaded by thugs wielding baseball bats. They smash vases, murder his daughter, and brutally rape his wife. One of the perpetrators is sentenced to death, but due to errors in the investigation, the other is released after a deal with the court orchestrated by the ambitious prosecutor Rice (Jamie Foxx) to save face. Ten years later, the engineer, bitterly disillusioned with the justice system but not idle, embarks on a personal vendetta. He gets himself imprisoned and, from within, begins to exact his revenge in ways incomprehensible to the law.
Remembering how often law-abiding maniacs have restored justice on screen with their bare hands, one hopes for a while that the writers won’t compromise and will develop the story of their avenging engineer into an unprecedented twist. Especially since one of the writers, Kurt Wimmer (Equilibrium (2002), Ultraviolet (2006)), isn’t a genius, but he’s not stupid either, and his twists can be quite glorious at times. And the ten years given to the hero to prepare his show is enough time to display, so to speak, engineering imagination and not fall flat on his face. Unfortunately, in the allotted hour and a half, “Law Abiding Citizen” methodically implements the latter option in a variety of ways. It’s a shame because the face of the citizen is played by the fashionable Gerard Butler, with whom particularly high expectations have been associated lately.
A Descent into Familiar Territory
It seems that the ten years given to the protagonist to avenge the system played a cruel joke not only on him but also on the film itself. All this time, like the grief-stricken engineer, the creators clearly sat locked up, fueling their unhealthy fantasies by watching videotapes with worn-out thrillers from the 90s, to ultimately create some kind of senseless parody of them.
Echoes of the Past
Modern trends affected the result only once when Butler’s character takes a grinder and gives “Hostel” (2005) a run for its money, dismembering a villain tied to some surgical equipment on the outskirts of the city. Further on, however, time flows in the opposite direction, turning the film into one long déjà-vu of “Se7en” (1995) and “Copycat” (1995). It’s been a while since we’ve seen such powerful backlighting, such depressing prisons, and such intellectual prisoners who show miracles of ingenuity and strip naked before being arrested.
The latter is very important: those who are dissatisfied with the face of Butler’s engineer, which clearly didn’t hit the mark, can at least admire his backside.