Gerard Butler's career has got to the point in Hollywood where he can now produce and release his own starring vehicles, and Law Abiding Citizen is his production company's first offering. It's a cat-and-mouse revenge thriller which apparently spent two years in development. The film has been a commercial success in the United States, where it has taken over $70 million at the box office.
Butler is Clyde Shelton, a family man and engineer who suffers a traqic and criminal loss in the film's opening moments. Times passes, but Clyde decides that justice has not been carried out and decides to take it out on both the perpetrators of the crime as well as the justice system itself.
There are plenty of derivative scenes here: from Silence of the Lambs to Deathwish, with a little bit of prison drama thrown in. Clyde's ascent from bitter widower to mastermind of an increasingly complex series of killings is not really that convincing.
Director F Gary Gray (who directed the remake of The Italian Job) tries his best to inject as much Hollywood drama and glitz into it, but even with Jamie Foxx as Clyde's lawyer nemesis, it fails to lift itself out of the ordinary.
Paul Hurley
