MOVIES
The Sunday Age
Sunday January 31, 2010
Clyde (Gerard Butler) is a loving family man who dotes upon his daughter. However, after a home invasion brings his idyll to a brutal end and the courts fail to mete out proper justice, Clyde goes crazy. Well, not quite, because he keeps a cool head as he launches into his campaign to set right the system that failed him. He's insistent that he's not an avenging angel targeting those who've wronged him, that his goals are political. And he actually makes some good points as he argues that US justice is failing the nation, explaining to the oh-so-slick chief prosecutor Nick (Jamie Foxx), "I'm at war with this broken thing that brought us together." Since Clyde is taking no prisoners and cares nothing for those who might get caught in the crossfire, Nick and the police force have to resort to his tactics in order to restore order. Written by Kurt Wimmer (The Recruit) and directed by F. Gary Gray (A Man Apart), Law Abiding Citizen (which is how Clyde describes himself) is not the kind of film where characters are smoothly rounded and underlying issues are given coherent consideration. The film has a plot that plays around with a couple of familiar moral quandaries: What should a law-abiding citizen do when the law fails him? How should a society defend itself against those who would destroy it? One doesn't have to look too hard here to find Osama bin Laden or a rednecked gun-lobby loony being channelled through Clyde, minus their accents. Like them, he is an insurgent, in fact a terrorist, who isn't prepared to allow the system to try to mend itself. It's a pity that the film overplays its hand by pushing Clyde so far over the top. Less might have led to a more measured consideration of his accusations. Essentially, though, Gray isn't really interested in all of this. His goal here is to up our adrenalin with some good old-fashioned edge-of-the-seat stuff rather than to have us depart the cinema reflecting on the politics of what we've just seen.˜…˜…LAW ABIDING CITIZEN(MA15+, 109 minutes). On general release
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