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Of all the people involved, Ames is probably the least well served by the system, not least in that 10 years of appeals evidence inadmissible for the initial prosecution isn't brought in to exonerate him, nor is he resentenced to life on a retrial (as occured in 118 of 124 cases tracked by the Associate Press). Darby did have one advantage, a lawyer of his own, indeed, one who can afford a camel coat and a pinky ring, but how this came to be isn't certain. Clyde sees Nick shake hands (albeit unwillingly) with the villainous Clarence Darby, and then vanishes. Told by the prosecutor that it's not about what happens, but what you can prove in court, Clyde is encouraged to accept the decision. Whatever the actual legal situation, in the film this relatively clear guideline sees the violent one get a lesser charge in return for testifying against the other, which sees the one who didn't do the killing get the death penalty. The film is set in Philadelphia, and the state of Pennsylvania uses a "recklessness rule" when it comes to deaths during the commission of a felony: it's a charge of Murder in the 2nd Degree. With the caveat that some "DNA evidence was inadmissable" (strike one for the system), the situation is this: two men, Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte, fresh from Public Enemies) who has a history of violent crimes and his hapless sidekick Rupert Ames (TV crime regular Josh Stewart), enter a house to rob it two people die.Įven without the DNA to link them to the stabbings, the "blood on the shirt", they're both there. The problem is that it's blatantly wrong, ludicrously so. Star prosecuter Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) is chasing his conviction statistics, so agrees to a plea bargain from one of the two. By the end of the ordeal, his wife and child are dead, and he has been stabbed. Gerard Butler is an engineer-type called Clyde Shelton, who answers the door to a pair of burglars-cum-home-invaders. Watching people die in a variety of ways is clearly a genre now, and Law Abiding Citizen clearly owes a debt to the Saw franchise and even Phone Booth, with its focus on what amounts to a sociopathic moral centre.Īs for the situation that starts the film, Wimmer's on shaky ground there, too. This isn't The Day Of The Jackal, as there's often no sense that these killings can be prevented. Here Wimmer's notions for action sequences don't really work, because we don't have here the elegance of gun-kata or the nonsense of "gravity levellers", instead we've got one-sided terrorist atrocities. He wrote and directed Equilibrium, which was smart, consistent, and entertaining, and he also wrote and directed Ultraviolet, which was not. The film's problems start with the script, written by the frustratingly scattershot Kurt Wimmer.
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It doesn't really manage any of these, instead flailing its way through a series of ostensible set-pieces until it reaches a conclusion that verges on the nonsensical. Law Abiding Citizen doesn't know if it wants to be a film where justice triumphs over the system, where the system triumphs over vigilantism, or where some stuff blows up real good.