The film Law Abiding Citizen is not good, especially the second half. The first half of the film has some interesting dilemmas and and makes for an compelling thriller, but the filmmakers stumbled over the ending.

The Plot

The movie starts with Gerard Butler who lives in a regular middle-to-upper class home with a wife and daughter. Two robbers come to the door and restrain Butler while stealing stuff from the foyer. His wife comes to the door, is attacked, and is raped in front of Butler by one of the thieves. His daughter notices from the hallway, after which she is taken by the same thief and raped and murdered.

Later on, in the law office that Butler has hired, the primary lawyer, played by Jamie Foxx, decides to use the confession of the man who murdered Butler’s family to put the other thief of death row while the confessor gets away with 5 years in prison. Butler is distraught at the failure of the legal system.

At the execution of the convicted thief, things go poorly and the thief struggles instead of calmly dying to the injections. The other thief, out of prison by this time and living in a rundown house, is guided away from being caught after the police found evidence of his tampering with the injection. He is tricked into thinking that Butler is a police officer who drives him away safely. Butler reveals himself and subdues the thief, taking him to a warehouse and dismembering the body. The police find the scene and capture Butler under Foxx’s suspicion.

In prison, Butler plays games with Foxx, offering to confess for various concessions. He confesses to the murder of the thieves for a bed. He trades the location of a lawyer that represented the thieves for a nice dinner. He uses the bone from the steak to murder his cellmate, and is moved to solitary confinement. It’s revealed that Butler is a CIA operative who specializes in assassination devices and killing hard to kill targets.

The judge at the trial of the thief is killed by an explosive in her cell phone. Several people, including a lawyer, are killed by car bombs in the parking lot of the prison. At the funeral, a rocket launching machine gun robot kills another lawyer. The mayor puts Philadelphia on lock-down.

Foxx finds out that Butler owns a garage next to the prison, which leads to tunnels to the prison’s solitary confinement cells. Butler is out of the prison, planting a bomb below a big meeting in city hall while dressed as a janitor. Foxx and his crew find the bomb and Butler comes back to solitary to find Foxx. Butler triggers the bomb with a cell phone call, the bomb has been brought to the cell, below Butler’s bed. Foxx runs away while Butler is locked in with the bomb.

My Impressions

The first half of the movie is fairly reasonable, with Butler being a man distraught and vengeful for the murder of his family. I was actually cheering for him through the whole film, even when it got ridiculous towards the end. When he blows up the cars in the parking lot and tries to blow up city hall, it didn’t seem to fit his vengeance story as those victims aren’t related to the harm caused to him. I think it could be a more interesting story than a switcheroo into being the villain. Ultimately, the moral of the movie is for Foxx’s character who learns to break the rules sometimes to achieve justice and to pursue and cherish activities with his family, which doesn’t resonate.

Many parts of the film are ridiculous:

  • Butler managed to swap chemicals in the execution by hacking the computers and changing the shipping location.
  • The whole semi-failed execution meme feels played out and it was obvious what would go wrong. This is a 2009 movie and perhaps the trope was not done or obvious at the time.
  • When Butler reveals who he is to the thief, the thief tries to shoot Butler with a pistol, but the trigger causes spikes with movement paralysis chemicals to poke out from the handle of the pistol.
  • The idea that Butler could plant an explosive in the judges phone is silly, but it was one of the best, funniest, scenes in the movie, so it gets a pass.
  • The parking lot bombs was absolutely terrible, even if it was surprising.
  • That he could escape from the prison via the tunnels.
  • It doesn’t seem reasonable that he could plant bombs on the cars in the prison parking lot without being caught.

The rocket launcher robot was by far the worse part, though. Taking place at a cemetery, using a modified military bomb defusal robot, using an EMP, using a machine gun, and using a rocket launcher just to kill an extremely tertiary character, was too far over the top and pointless. That’s the turning point in the film for me. It stops being an intriguing thriller into a dumb action movie.

The tunnels below the prison sealed the deal. They “explain” how he did it without any nuance while at the same time Butler has lost traction on the vengeance plot line. Finally, they cap it off with the idea that he’s going to blow up city hall with an suitcase bomb, yuck.

I may have seen this movie before, deja vu bells rang in some scenes, but most scenes and details were not fresh in my memory. It may have been a long time ago or at a time when I wasn’t paying much attention. I didn’t know the twist at the end.

My Movdeez rating for this film is 728 out of 1165 films, or 3.8. It’s a fun vengence thriller at times that goes over the top in some good and some bad ways.