Sometimes, even The A.V. Club isn’t impervious to the sexy allure of ostensible cultural garbage. Which is why there’s I Watched This On Purpose, our feature exploring the impulse to spend time with trashy-looking yet in some way irresistible entertainments, playing the long odds in hopes of a real reward and a good time.
Cultural infamy: In a funny coincidence, my dad called me last night wanting to talk about Law Abiding Citizen, the 2009 F. Gary Gray-directed thriller starring Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler. He frequently calls to ask my opinion on whatever movie he happened to rent that week, and almost as frequently begins the discussion by telling me that he’s glad my stepmom didn’t decide to watch it with him: “Kathy wouldn’t have lasted five minutes with all the violence.” But like me, my dad keeps going back to the well of movies that are almost sure to be crap. I never entirely pieced together whether he liked Law Abiding Citizen, though I learned that he had never seen Gerard Butler in anything before. Not that I would necessarily trust dad’s opinion: When Pulp Fiction came out, he didn’t like it at all. He found it far too violent, and thought the violence was treated with far too little reverence. (“When that kid got shot in the back seat of the car, everybody in the theater laughed,” he said, astonished.)
More importantly, what did the liberal media think about Law Abiding Citizen? According to the cover of the DVD, Roger Ebert said it was a “taut thriller.” Neither of those words exactly implies an endorsement, though Ebert’s review is the highest on Metacritic, at 75—a.k.a. three stars. By the end of his review, however, Ebert has already started backpedaling: “Law Abiding Citizen is one of those movies you like more at the time than in retrospect. I mean, come on, you’re thinking. Still, there’s something to be said for a movie you like well enough at the time.” In a way, that’s a good summation of I Watched This On Purpose itself. So good on ya, Roger.
Other critics were not so kind. Our own Scott Tobias gave it the dreaded D, which to me means it wasn’t bad enough to be F-level-enjoyable in its ineptitude, and not even good enough to recommend as a distraction. He does call it “flagrantly ridiculous,” though, which gave me some hope. Better that than trying to apply real-life rules to brainless action movies. Give me Crank any day.
Curiosity factor: Or give me Saw, the movie to which Law Abiding Citizen was compared in pretty much every review. Presumably it’s because both offer elaborate revenge-torture fantasies, and who can’t get behind that? Here’s what I knew from the trailer: Gerard Butler’s family is murdered. One of the perps is freed on a technicality or something. Butler sets about murdering the people in the justice system who allowed it to happen (or something) until they let him murder the actual murderer. (This impression turned out to be wrong.) Jamie Foxx is a D.A. who’s perhaps torn between “doing the right thing” (following the law) and “doing the right thing” (allowing some old-fashioned murderin’ to take place in the name of justice). Apparently the Saw comparisons come into play via Butler’s elaborate killings. Sounds like fun?
In any case, revenge movies can be cathartic and entertaining, even for pants-wetting liberals like myself. (And they usually throw us a bone by telling the person seeking revenge, “killing him won’t bring back your [wife, daughter, etc.]!”) Revenge movies are awesome, even when they suck, to put it simply. (See: The Italian Job, Payback, Four Brothers.) And when they’re even a little good, they’re even more awesome. (See: Kill Bill, The Devil’s Rejects, Oldboy.) So I’m in.
The viewing experience: Well, Law Abiding Citizen is pretty stupid, to be sure, but it starts promisingly enough, even if no one will mistake its premise for originality. Gerard Butler, having a lovely evening at home with his adorable wife and button-cute daughter, answers a knock at the door only to be kicked and stabbed—then forced to watch his dying wife raped by a cold-blooded robber/rapist/murderer. His daughter is then taken to another room by the more sinister of the two thugs—their degrees of culpability are important later—and presumably also subjected to things that the moviegoing public would rather not think about. (The badness mostly takes place offscreen.)
Anyway, Baddie A does the murdering and raping while Baddie B looks like he wants no part of it. But because of AMERICA’S STUPID JUSTICE SYSTEM (movie’s emphasis), Baddie A is able to testify against Baddie B and pin all the blame on him. Jamie Foxx, who’s kind of an asshole throughout the whole movie, has to explain this to the aggrieved Butler. The truly evil Baddie will get out of prison in five years, and the guilty bystander will die by lethal injection. (Why? Because the judge ruled something something DNA something stupid too much Law And Order made-up junk inadmissible something something.) “It’s an imperfect system,” says the guy who played MacGyver’s buddy.
So Foxx delivers the news to Butler, who is understandably upset, but shows no signs of being a revenge-seeking super-killer capable of planning and executing Rube Goldberg-like plans for vengeance. (And who also maybe turns out to be a former super-spy. More on that later.) Foxx pooh-poohs Butler’s insistence that his eyewitness testimony will be enough to convict these killers, saying “Your testimony won’t be reliable.” (Wha?) Then, in a moment that’s reflected in real-life plea deals every day, Foxx gives a press conference, during which for some reason the plea-dealt Baddie A is able to come up and shake his hand. Watching from a distance, Butler seethes. Why was he standing so far away from the action? Only the director can tell you.