Stages of Grief

Let’s hear it for a film that wastes no time getting down to business. Although the ending proves to be completely implausible, no matter how much the backstory explains things away, Law Abiding Citizen has the prospects of being a true crowd-pleaser.

As soon as it’s established that Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is a happy family man — tinkering on some electronics while chatting with his smiling young daughter — there’s a knock on the door. Two thieves enter, beat him to a pulp and kill his wife and daughter. The violence is fast and brutal and, fortunately, mostly off-screen.

Here comes ambitious prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), a self-assured fellow with a 90-percent conviction rate and dreams of a political future, explaining to the grieving Clyde that the only way to make sure at least one of the two perpetrators gets a death sentence is to let the other one — the “cooperative witness” — go free as part of a plea bargain.

Clyde, who saw everything till he blacked out and who knows exactly what happened, is shattered, angry, his eyes filled with confused tears. But he’s firmly told by Nick, “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove in court,” a phrase that will later haunt him.

Ten years go by. We’re treated to an imaginatively sculpted, flashily edited sequence of two different audiences — one watching a classical recital, the other watching an execution. The recital is great. But something goes very wrong at what was supposed to be a painless execution. Clyde, it seems, has been dreaming of revenge.

And here’s where the film’s main story really begins and gives both Foxx and Shelton plenty of room to act up two very different types of storms.

Foxx offers a serious, straightforward performance that combines both aggressiveness and a touch of uncertainty, and perfectly complements Butler’s enthusiastic experiment in pulling out every stop he can find.

The film becomes a study of Nick, fighting for justice, and Clyde, out to prove that the justice system doesn’t work and that he’s going to fix it — as people who have wronged him start dying. Screenwriter Kurt Wimmer (The Thomas Crown Affair, The Recruit) takes that premise and surrounds it with brutal violence and unexpected ironic humor — until the humor finally vanishes.

Clyde is one of the most anti-heroic heroes ever thrown into a contemporary thriller, and he eventually becomes sort of a combination of a much more serious and deadly Joker and a gadget-loving Batman. A new twist is given to the old legal adage that everyone must be held accountable for their actions, and even though the killings continue and the body count piles up, the story never turns into a whodunit. It’s much more of a how-the-heck-is-he-doing-it. The story remains a big puzzle right up to that improbable ending, with Clyde ever the missing piece to what’s going on.