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Kim Voynar

By Kim Voynar Voynar@moviecitynews.com

Posted Saturday, October 17th, 2009 - Comments Off on Review: Law Abiding Citizen
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Review: Law Abiding Citizen

Directed by F. Gary Gray

Way back in March, I reviewed the dreadful movie Knowing. At the time, I thought perhaps I’d seen the worst atrocity foisted upon mainsteam theater audiences in 2009. Well, folks, we have another contender this week: the dreadful Jamie Foxx-Gerard Butler vehicle Law Abiding Citizen. If you’re short on time, let me get right to the point: Save your money. If you want more details on why, or you just enjoy reading about absurdly bad movies, do read on.

Here’s what we have in the way of a plot, to the extent that the film actually has one: Gerard Butler plays Clyde, the law-abiding citizen/crazy guy who goes off the deep end after his wife and daughter are murdered in a home invasion. (And for the record, “Clyde” is never a “law abiding citizen”-type name. Mark, or Steve, or Bill perhaps, but never “Clyde.”)

Why Clyde’s family is targeted, and how he ends up left alive while he wife and young daughter are dead, we don’t really know, but just assume we’re working with your typical Steven Seagal-level “they killed my family and now everyone must pay! Muahahaha!” plot and go from there. If you start at the bottom, there’s no where to go but up, right? Hah. If you think that, you didn’t pay enough attention in math class, where we learned about how things can actually be less than zero — which is certainly the case with this film.

Jamie Foxx, an otherwise talented guy, has the vast misfortune to be cast in this film as Nick Rice, the dapper, career-minded prosecutor who strikes a devil’s bargain that lets the more obviously evil of the two bad guys cut a sweet deal with the state.

Poor Clyde goes all mental and spends the next decade (A decade! Now that’s tenacity!) plotting his revenge. Not just on the guys who actually killed his wife and daughter — that wouldn’t make for a very long movie, silly! — but on everyone associated with the case, including Nick, who was just doing his job, after all. But Clyde is out to change the system! By killing everyone! For the record, none of this is spoiler, because what plot points there are to the film were all cut together into the trailer.

So Clyde, even from behind bars, manages to carry out his nefarious plot to get his revenge on those who wronged his murdered family. The guy is locked up behind bars, but he still manages to blow shit up and kill people and no one can stop (or apparently even monitor) him. He’s like Criss Angel, pulling off ridiculously impossible stunts. Only Criss Angel is cool and kind of sexy, and Clyde is a sociopath in a film in which the lameness, unfortunately, is not an illusion.

Nick, meanwhile, had a daughter of his own shortly after the events that kick off the film, so now he has a wife and daughter — just like poor Clyde once had. Hmm … is that a potential plot point I smell? Unfortunately, Kurt Wimmer, the screenwriter, after setting this up, fails to do anything remotely interesting with it or any of the other plot points that litter the film (though to be fair to Wimmer, it’s entirely possible that his script kicked ass and the studio suits mucked it up).

Whoever’s to blame, Law Abiding Citizen is as littered with problems as it is dead bodies. There are many better ways to spend your time and money this weekend, folks. Go see An Education, or Where the Wild Things Are, or Paranormal Activity. Take a walk, bake some bread, scrub your toilet. However you choose to spend your time, it will be better spent than if you’d wasted 90 minutes of it sitting through this wretchedly bad film.

-by Kim Voynar

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon