the Informer

More and more things in society nowadays are deserving of the designation of "cookie cutter." McMansions, McVehicles, McMusic, it goes on. New ideas are falling by the wayside and entertainment culture is bearing the brunt of it. This well worn trail of scorched Fall Out Boy CDs and burnt copies of "American Pie 6: The Return of Dick Jokes" goes on until it peters out at director F. Gary Gray's front door.

When it comes to movies, no recent flicks seemed to be able to set the bar at mediocre as well as Gray's "Law Abiding Citizen." Most movies dive right in with a focal point, a central thesis. As it goes on, this point becomes fleshed out, and the end of the movie brings it all together in one fell swoop. Although this movie tries to be unique by switching it around, in the end, they basically have just another action-y flick with some badly acted tense moments. I half expected Steven Seagal to kick through a wall partway through the movie and then just star in the rest of the film.

It starts out nice. Clyde Shelton (played by Gerard Butler) is with his wife and daughter; he's working on a project while his kid makes jewelry for Mommy and Daddy and his wife is making dinner. He comes upstairs to get some eats, just in time for a knock at the door. Like the preview suggests, this is not such a great idea. He goes to answer the door and- surprise! -it's a creepy looking robber and his weird friend. The first man decides to rape/murder/rob the upper-middle class family they rudely interrupted before dinner, while his friend figures it would be more productive to stand there, complain and tell him to stop all the rape and murder. The first thing that annoyed me about this movie occurred in this scene: the rapist kept saying "you can't escape fate" to Shelton the entire time it was happening – even if I didn't know the premise to the film I could have explained the rest of the plot in detail at that exact moment: Shelton will survive, go crazy and kill these guys in a gruesome way.

Shelton witnesses these things happening to his family, but eventually falls unconscious when it becomes too much for him to handle. In the next scene, we are introduced to Jamie Foxx's character, Nick Rice. Rice works for the District Attorney's (DA) office, and he is on Shelton's case. Because Shelton lost consciousness, his testimony is invalid, so the case is not going as well as he would hope. The main guy that did the raping and murdering decided to go for a plea deal, and although Rice wants to put him behind bars for life, he decides that the plea deal is the safe way to go. Rapist man's partner who did mostly nothing gets the full on lethal injection, while the main bad guy ends up in jail for basically nothing compared to the crimes he committed: a few years or so.

The other scene that basically gives away everything that's coming in the movie is when the bad guy goes to shake Rice's hand after the trial. Rice does it because people are watching, but he is not happy. Photographers snap a picture and off in the distance we can see Shelton's character seething at the unfair ruling, and plotting something with the image of his lawyer shaking the hand of the man that murdered his family emblazoned in the back of his mind. To sum it up, he is going to try to kill Jamie Foxx.

Fast forward 10 years, Nick Rice has a family now, he is an accomplished assistant to the DA and he is about to witness the execution of a man that stood there and watched his friend rape Clyde Shelton's family a decade ago. Lethal injections typically aren't unpleasant for the victim, but something happens. The man has a violent reaction to the third chemical injected into his system. He dies in a pretty horrible way, but it's effective. The DA starts investigating, and when his partner (the evil rapist who is out of jail on parole) becomes targeted next, they start putting two and two together. This leads to a nude scene involving Gerard Butler being arrested by the cops – I get the point, he wanted the cops to know he was unarmed so he wouldn't be shot on sight, but was it really necessary?

Because I respect the people that read these movie reviews, I will skip to the end of the movie. The middle parts consist of the DA's office figuring out almost immediately that Shelton is the one killing people, and the next hour and 15 minutes are spent trying to figure out how he is doing it, but not actually taking any measure to stop it. I can now say with some authority that watching a movie where the good guys know who the bad guy is but keep not doing anything even though the good guys are getting picked off is pretty damn annoying. It was even annoying to write.

The end of the movie irritated me the most. The idea of "you can't escape fate," the concept that if you kill people then you will in turn get what is coming to you, aka the point of the movie, becomes irrelevant because Rice tricks Shelton into killing himself. "You can't escape fate" he says; so what does that mean for Rice? Well he becomes the DA and assumedly lives happily ever after, because the only guy that wanted to off him already killed himself. Yeah. The last two hours of your life just turned irrelevant.

In the end, I just felt like I got nothing out of my time in the theater. Sure, parts of it were intriguing, and the craziness and intricacy of Gerard Butler's character actually made me think that I got my money's worth, but when the end of the movie rolled around and decided to go contradict itself, I realized that even though the ticket was free, I still deserved 10 bucks back.

In the end I give this movie a 5 out of 10. Butler and Foxx did the best they could with the script they had, and although neither of them are necessarily the brightest stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, they made this movie remotely enjoyable.