Law Abiding Citizen Review!

The premise of Law Abiding Citizen is what everyone of us feels or has felt at sometime of taking matters into our own hands and dishing out justice ourselves. Gerard Butler is the wronged husband and father here, intruders break into his house and kill his wife and daughter right in front of his eyes. They are arrested but the District Attorney Jamie Foxx strikes a deal with one of the criminals turning witness and subsequently being let off with a mild sentence due to lack of evidence. This obviously incenses Gerard Butler no end who bides his time for 10 long years before going down the path of revenge in true vigilante style. Gerard Butler, however, does not limit his revenge only to the killers of his wife and daughter but also takes it upon himself to correct the legal system and begins by targeting everyone involved in his case like the defendants lawyer, the District Attorney, the prosecutors, the paralegals and even the judge. The means by which Gerard Butler goes about getting his revenge is ingenious to say the least and try as they might the District Attorney Jamie Foxx and the police are not able to pin anything on Gerard Butler due to lack of evidence.

The game of cat and mouse between Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler will have most of us cheering for Gerard Butler and jeering the cops and the judiciary for their failure in meting out justice to the real criminals. There is a fair bit of killing done by Gerard Butler before the final showdown between him and Jamie Foxx. The ending though is pretty limp and pretty much indicative of director F. Gary Gray (The Negotiator, A Man Apart, The Italian Job) not knowing how to end things. This makes for an unsatisfying outing with Law Abiding Citizen with the feeling the movie on the whole could have been much better. Gerard Butler does seem to be on a downward spiral after 300 and even his recent outing in Gamer was disappointing. Jamie Foxx is passably okay. The premise of Law Abiding Citizen is good, the treatment though should have been much better. Passable fare.