This weekend I went to see "Law Abiding Citizen" and I can sum it up in 4 words: Great movie, shitty ending. It had a good storyline, great comments on our justice system, clever & brutal ways to kill people, but I walked out of the theater feeling cheated.
For those who have not seen the trailers, this is a revenge movie where Clyde (Gerard Butler) witnessed his wife and daughter get murdered but due a series of events, the main culprit is able to strike a deal with the D.A. (Jaime Fox) and eventually get out of prison 5 years later. Gerard Butler has a plan 10 years in the making to get revenge on the culprits, the D.A., the judge, and even the mayor of the city through a series of extravagant, mainly explosive, devices. The best part of the movie is the fact that you are on the fence on who you want to win in the end, Gerard Butler or Jaime Fox.
At first, the movie was playing out to be similar to the movie "Fracture", where a genius killer uses loopholes in the justice system to get away with murder but this plot line was quickly extinguished when Clyde stabs his cellmate in the neck with a steak bone. The plot then started pointing towards the fact that the only way to stop Clyde would be to kill him, and Clyde being the genius that he is, probably knew that and has been planning on dying the whole time. The problem is that (spoiler alert) Jaime Fox does stop him without needing to kill him, but does so anyway. And he doesn't outsmart Clyde either; he gets lucky and discovers how Clyde has been executing these murders while being contained to solitary confinement. As the viewer, we are left thinking "What the hell was the moral of this story?" and the only thing I could come up with is that the only way to deal with murderers is to kill them and that our justice system is fucked. I would have rather seen Clyde win or Jaime Fox get killed in some elaborate trap set up from the get-go after the movie seemed to be over. I hope the DVD has that as an alternate ending.
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