John Chard
Jun 6, 2014
8/10
You can’t fight fate. Right?
Gerard Butler stars as Clyde Shelton, a man forced to not only watch his wife and daughter be raped and murdered in his own home, but to also have to sit there and watch the justice system fail him. So he wages a one man war against pretty much everyone involved.
Hoo-Hah! The big hitting critics hated it, with comments ranging from it being sub-normal, preposterous, ugly and morally corrupt, to it being a comic book film of moral hectoring! Naturally, as the critics were at pains to point out that it would, it made a pot load at the box office and is generally well liked by a good portion of the action/revenge/thriller loving populace.
There’s always a big grey area with revenge/vigilante movies that really brings out the debate crowd, but what rarely gets said is that through the actions of these cinematic waste layers is the chance for many, many, folk to live vicariously. Yes! 99% of the common man and woman do indeed sit back and trust our respective legal systems to do what’s right and just, but oh how we feel that given similar circumstances we would want to vent spleen with furious anger.
Law Abiding Citizen is a riot, at its heart it does have something to say, even asking some pertinent questions. Do these social smarts come bursting through the bloody haze to make a point? No, they get submerged in a whirl of kinetic fury and socko violence, but they are there, caustically so. But hey! For shocks, twists and outrageous set-pieces, this picture rocks the big one. Vicarious living through cinema – wonderful. 8/10