Law Abiding Citizen ( *1/2 )

October 15, 2009 12:57 p.m. EST

108 minutes

In theaters October 16, 2009

Rating: R, Thriller

With Gerard Butler's vigilante going Charles Bronson one or two better, Law Abiding Citizen wants to be a Death Wish for the new century.

Well, it manages that, all right. This exploitative revenge thriller has a sadistic streak that puts a sour taste in your mouth in its very opening scene that stays there until the final credits roll. By the time the central character has started auditioning for the next Saw sequel, we're squarely in torture-porn territory.

Law Abiding Citizen makes believe that it's interested in questioning the justice system. But nobody in charge means a word of this. Distinctions between right and wrong, between heroes and villains, between testing boundaries and stampeding over them, are secondary to the film's main concern: setting up its violent set pieces for maximum slobber value.

Gerard Butler plays Clyde Shelton, an involved family man whose wife and daughter are brutally murdered in front of him during a home invasion.

Jamie Foxx plays Nick Rice, the Philadelphia assistant district attorney who orchestrates the plea bargain that allows the killers of Clyde's family to go free. The prosecutor's boss forces him to offer one of the two suspects a light sentence -- just a few years in jail -- in exchange for testifying against the other, who ends up executed via lethal injection.

A decade later, Clyde does some orchestrating of his own. Not only does the guy who got away with murder turn up dead, but Clyde admits that it was he who committed the vengeful execution.

Clyde has not only exacted vengeance, he's decided to bring the system of jurisprudence to its knees by becoming a one-man terrorist cell. His threat to Nick: either fix the corrupted system of justice that has failed to honor the memory of his family, or key official participants in the trial will die.

And, improbably but ineluctably -- even from a prison cell -- he follows through on his seemingly fantastical threat. His series of assassinations, which the authorities are apparently powerless to stop, panics Philadelphia's population.

Only Nick, who also has a suddenly vulnerable wife and daughter, is in a position to get through to Clyde.

Director F. Gary Gray (Be Cool, The Italian Job, The Negotiator) seems to have been strongly influenced by Seven, especially in his staging of the crime scenes.

And he would appear to be so proud of one shocking moment of murderous violence -- playing to the audience's lowest-common-denominator base instincts -- that he loses all touch with whatever this vigilante-vengeance volcano is supposed to actually be about.

The silliest element of Kurt Wimmer's phony-baloney screenplay is the impossibly resourceful and manipulative mastermind pulling the sociopathic strings from a maximum-security prison. When you render your pivotal character several steps ahead of everybody and everything, you take a chance of him becoming an easy-to-dismiss cartoon character and his exploits becoming not daunting or disturbing but laughable.

And that's exactly what happens here.

Yet even that is not as offensive as the truly ridiclous wrap-up. And no late plot twist can erase the stench that's been loosed on an audience for the previous hour.

Rooting interest? Forget it. Despite as much underserved misfortune as any movie character could possibly have garnered coming out of the gate, Butler's character proceeds to become off-the-charts unsympathetic. And bored-to-tears Foxx, playing the only major character left to identify with or care about, doesn't help by turning in a distracted, empty performance, phoning it in without leaving the room.

But the biggest crime (among many) of Law Abiding Citizen is its sickening disregard for human life, compounded exponentially by its hypocritical pretentiousness as a beacon of progressive societal values and a force of rightreous indignation.

Puh-leeeze.

Hateful and unintentionally hilarious, Law Abiding Citizen is a ridiculous retribution thriller that's difficult if not impossible to abide.