Sweet Crude: Law Abiding Citizen Gets to the Gooshy Stuff

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.