Law Abiding Citizen

If you can buy ‘300’ star Gerard Butler as a vigilante with a penchant for quoting Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, this knee-jerk vengeance thriller may spark your synapses. Ten years after witnessing the brutal murder of his wife and daughter, Clyde Shelton (Butler) repays the two killers responsible: one dies screaming after Clyde rigs the lethal injection, the other meets a torturous end that is videotaped and sent to Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), an ambitious assistant DA who, a decade before, negotiated an expedient plea bargain for the second killer. But when Clyde is arrested, he declares war on the city of Philadelphia and its political and legal institutions. ‘I’m gonna bring the whole fuckin’ diseased, corrupt temple down on your head,’ he tells Rice. And he does, despite being behind bars. Director F Gary Gray’s remake of ‘The Italian Job’ was a solid effort, as was writer Kurt Wimmer’s reworking of ‘The Thomas Crown Affair’. Sadly, there’s nothing here but bloody off-cuts from ‘Death Wish’, ‘Saw’ and ‘The Silence of the Lambs’, in roughly that order.