Aside from a small number of species, most animals don't practice let alone understand the meaning of revenge. Sure, a dog might attack a person who's mistreated it, but that's reactive rather than proactive. In other words, it's highly unlikely that the pooch spent all day planning the attack.
Humans, on the other hand, are motivated, along with other emotions, by vengeance. Although younger kids often follow the old "eye for an eye" mantra in terms of how they deal out revenge, most (but certainly not all) adults are more civilized.
While they might want to strike back or otherwise deliver some personal retribution, they usually end up letting the legal system do just that. Even so, it's often a frustrating process where whatever punishment is meted out sometimes doesn't meet the desires of those who've been wronged. Worse yet is when the culprits get off scot-free without any restitution.
All of which explains the appeal to some (and sometimes a lot of) viewers of fiction where the victim or wronged person takes the law, loosely defined, into their own hands and serves as the judge, jury and executioner all wrapped up into one. While Charles Bronson's "Death Wish" is the epitome of such flicks, others have followed suit in letting the viewer vicariously experience the delivery of some comeuppance where any given film's villains serve as stand-ins for whomever might have wronged the viewer in their past.
The latest such flick is "Law Abiding Citizen," a suspense thriller that works sporadically until its escalating preposterousness eventually overwhelms the story and suffocates any sort of "fun" the viewer might have in watching the vigilante do his thing and/or the hero figure out how to stop him before, natch, he also ends up on the completed hit list.
Here, Gerard Butler plays an inventor whose wife and child are murdered during a home invasion, with Clyde unable to stop that due to being bound at the time. Speaking of the latter, it then passes, first to a year later when the prosecuting attorney (Jamie Foxx doing the successful but working too hard to spend time with his kid part) agrees to a deal just to get some time for the two perps, and then a decade later when the majority of the story takes place.
Nearing the excesses of the "torture porn" subgenre, Clyde takes care of the two true villains in grisly fashion, followed by surrendering to the police, only to face Foxx's character again, but this time from the other side of the table. Yet, rather than be done, Clyde continues on his "get even" tour, somehow seemingly doing so while locked up behind bars. The mystery of how he's pulling that off gives him the upper hand in negotiating what he wants, although that's never to be released or have the charges dropped against him. Instead, and somewhat channeling Dr. Lecter, he seems to enjoy the game, and for a while the viewer might join him in going along for that ride.
Alas, a number of problems arise that get in the way of that being as entertaining an experience as it might have been. First, while his targets in the legal system might not have done their jobs to the best of their abilities, the targeting of death for them seems a bit excessive, unlike the real culprits who obviously deserve what they get. Accordingly, the delivered punishment doesn't proportionally fit the crime, thus lessening one's enjoyment of doing the cathartic ride along thing, all of which turn the anti-hero into more of a true villain.
I understand that's what the filmmakers -- director F. Gary Gray and writer Kurt Wimmer -- are going for, but the out of kilter balance will keep viewers at arm's length, while the material isn't deep and/or smart enough to work in nebulous shades of gray like it could and probably should.
Then there's the fact that things escalate so much from far-fetched to outright preposterous that any sort of guilty pleasure vibe ends up lost in the mounting ludicrousness of the material. It's hard to go too in-depth here to avoid giving away spoilers regarding how the victim turned anti-hero turned perp does what he does and why from that location, but suffice it to say, some serious amounts of eye rolling will occur once everything is revealed.
And that doesn't even consider that if the character is indeed what he's later defined as, he wouldn't ever have allowed the initial event to occur, or the good guys to catch him in the act at the end. The fact that both occur negates most everything that happens in between them. As is often the case, some simple script tweaks could have solved those various issues. Unfortunately, they're not present, and once the viewer starts pondering "why this" and "how that" as things are unfolding, they're taken out of the moment and the emotional and/or visceral engagement is lost in those scenes and/or with the entire offering.
All of which is too bad since Butler makes a for a decent, scheming villain. When his character, who's had the upper hand for most of the film, tells Foxx's "I'm just getting warmed up" and "It's gonna be Biblical" (referring to what's yet to come), the part of you that enjoys Bronsonian revenge hopes he's right. Sadly, neither his be all and end all plan nor the attempted execution of it delivers on those promised goods. That results in the conclusion feeling like a letdown, thus robbing the film (and viewer) of at least some giddy, over-the-top guilty pleasure fun.
Somewhat entertaining for a bit but ultimately falling apart as it unfolds, "Law Abiding Citizen" proves that human plans involving revenge -- be they real or just fictional -- usually don't play out in a way that satisfies everyone. The film rates as a 3.5 out of 10.
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