Law Abiding Citizen (2009)

The moment the justice promised by law becomes an object of bargaining, what can one person do? Law Abiding Citizen is a film that poses that question in the cruelest way. A man who lost his family before his own eyes sets out for revenge upon realizing that what set the culprit free was none other than the judicial system itself. It looks like an ordinary revenge tale, but in that its target is not a single criminal but the entire structure that let him live, it is of a different grain.

What it’s about — Paralyzing a city from inside a prison

Clyde (Gerard Butler) is an ordinary inventor. On a night when robbers break in, he watches helplessly as his wife and daughter are murdered. The prosecutor Nick (Jamie Foxx), citing the difficulty of proving guilt, strikes a plea deal with the ringleader, and the man who was in fact more brutal receives only a light punishment. Ten years later, Clyde begins a meticulously prepared revenge. Yet the edge of that blade is aimed not only at the culprit but at the prosecutor who led the deal and at the entire judicial system. His method of paralyzing a city even while voluntarily confined to prison shakes the audience between exhilaration and dread.

Direction — A chase that covers its gaps with speed

F. Gary Gray runs the story on two axes. One is the unpredictable retaliation Clyde carries out, the other Nick’s pursuit to stop it. The director sets the level of violence high from the start to grip the audience firmly, then gradually shifts the weight into the realm of a battle of wits. The premise of how a confined figure moves the outside world has, if you scrutinize it, no shortage of holes. Even so, by never slowing the pace, the film gives the audience no room to chew over those gaps. The editing that never lets go of the thread of tension and the use of music are especially deft.

That said, toward the latter half there is the impression that Clyde’s plans are inflated for directorial shock rather than plausibility. At that point the film sets down some of the gravity of the social questions it raised early on and tilts toward genre thrills. The gaze that finds this turn regrettable is entirely understandable.

Performance — Butler’s two faces, victim and architect

The center of gravity in this film is clearly Gerard Butler. He holds within one figure the two faces of a grief-sunken victim and a coldly calculating architect. That the collapsing expression right after losing his family and the chill of the latter half, when he seems to control everything, belong to the same person carries persuasiveness. Jamie Foxx stably draws a prosecutor wavering between ambition and conscience. The process by which a figure who first put efficiency forward gradually awakens to the weight of the justice he turned away from, Foxx expresses without exaggeration. The scenes where the two actors sit facing each other in the visiting room in a war of nerves are the densest moments in this film.

What the film says — Is a plea bargain just?

On the surface Law Abiding Citizen is one man’s revenge tale, but at its bottom lies an uncomfortable question about the institution of plea bargaining. Is a system that abandons part of the truth for the sake of efficiency truly just? The film does not endorse Clyde’s rampage, yet it makes the starting point of his fury hard for the audience to look away from. So after watching this film your heart does not settle neatly. The target of revenge is clear, and yet what that revenge resolved remains ambiguous to the end.

Ratings and reception

Law Abiding Citizen holds a 7.4/10 on IMDb. Its Rotten Tomatoes freshness was a stingy 26 percent of critical response, with heavy criticism of the latter half’s leaps of premise and depiction of violence. Its Metacritic score, too, stops at 34 out of 100. The interesting point is that audience reaction was quite different from the critics’, because the satisfaction of the fast pace and the showdown between the two actors was great. Watching it with the awareness that this is a divisive work actually keeps expectations appropriate.

Verdict

The power to keep you watching to the end even while you know the holes in its logic, that is this film’s identity. It is hard to say the sharp problem-consciousness toward the judicial system and the genre thrills combine perfectly, but the taut standoff between the two actors and the unflagging sense of speed alone earn their keep. It is a work that makes you willing to watch it again even after admitting its flaws, so four stars are well deserved.

Recommended for

• Those who want to chew over themes like plea bargaining or the limits of justice
• Those who enjoy a psychological duel where two actors collide head-on
• Those who prefer a fast-paced development over logical completeness