Film

Sweet Crude: Law Abiding Citizen Gets to the Gooshy Stuff

by Andrew Wright

More durable than most, the vigilante revenge flick is that rare kind of movie that actually benefits from a lack of subtlety: The broader the handling, the easier it is to queasily, vicariously enjoy watching the bad guys get righteously rubbed out. (Neil Jordan's The Brave One may be a much more intelligent, reasoned film than, say, Death Wish 3, but which one would you rather watch after a bad day at the office?) The new Grisham-meets-Saw mashup Law Abiding Citizen may be lacking in social graces—it's about as dignified and refined as a Hell's Angel fighting a caveman—but on the red meat, reptile brain level, it scores.

Wasting absolutely no time with preamble, the plot concerns a nebbishy (well, as nebbishy as it's possible for someone like Gerard Butler to get) engineer who loses his wife and child during a home invasion, only to then see the perpetrators get off easy via a deal with Jamie Foxx's slick, career-minded prosecutor. A decade later, the guilty parties on both sides of the law start blowing up real good, in increasingly spectacular ways.

Director F. Gary Gray (The Italian Job) and writer Kurt Wimmer (previously responsible for the high-concept troglodyte doozies Equilibrium and Ultraviolet) pay lip service to the ethical and moral quandaries inherent in the premise, but their interests lie mainly in the gooshy stuff. On that basement level, the film undeniably delivers, with a taut, escalating series of unusually brutal, well-orchestrated money shots bolstered by Butler's occasionally mournful cool and Foxx's patented breezy egotism. Giving the thumbs-up to a movie for being illogical, preposterous, and borderline offensive is iffy, I know; but that very crudity is the key to the film's—and maybe the entire genre's—success: For an hour and a half, it lets you root for the lions.