Editorial
Front Page - Friday, November 6, 2009
The Critic's Corner
David Laprad
“Law Abiding Citizen” opens with a scene of devastating violence that made me angry on behalf of Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler), the only surviving victim of the crime. And it ended with me wishing I’d never given Shelton, or the movie, the time of day.
My change of heart happened slowly. In the beginning, I felt sorry for Shelton, a loving father and husband whose life is changed when he answers a knock at his front door. After an assailant smacks him in the face with a baseball bat, he stays conscious long enough to see the man who hit him brutally rape and murder his wife and then carry his young daughter off to another room to be killed.
It’s a terrible crime, but the murderer gets a reduced sentence when assistant district attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) arranges for him to testify against his accomplice. Supporting characters suggest Rice doesn’t want to risk his high conviction rate by taking the case to court, while Rice argues that some justice is better than none.
Shelton feels betrayed, as most of us would, and sets out to exact revenge against the entire criminal justice system, as few of us would.
The first to go is the killer’s accomplice, who Shelton somehow poisons during a routine death row execution, giving him a more painful death than he otherwise would’ve suffered. Shelton then kills the man who murdered his family and allows himself to be arrested.
The killings continue once Shelton is in jail, and over time, Rice becomes obsessed with finding out how Shelton is pulling off the increasingly elaborate carnage.
Unfortunately, what he uncovers is lame. For me, however, the bigger problem of the film is Shelton’s tectonic shift in personality. In the beginning, viewers are encouraged to identify with Shelton because of the terrible things his family endured, but Shelton eventually becomes a monster, willing to kill every person even remotely associated with the case. At his hands, innocent people die, and by the end of the movie, he’s willing to kill dozens of high-ranking officials in a single act of terrorism to make his point.
“Law Abiding Citizen” is cheap, unadulterated viewer manipulation. I like Butler, as always, but have no other positive thoughts about the movie.
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Hollywood must think most of the people who go to films are stupid. In their mind, we have no capacity for critical thought; just give us a few goose bumps and we’re good to go. This, in turn, gives moviemakers a license to be lazy.
There’s no other explanation for why “The Stepfather” exists. There are moments in the film that do more than defy reason, they rail against the laws of physics to give us cheap jolts people who rarely go to the movies will see coming.
Like the much better 80s film on which it’s based, “The Stepfather” opens with David Harris altering his appearance and leaving the wife and children he just killed, ostensibly because they disappointed him.
Viewers then learn that law enforcement officials know everything about Harris except his whereabouts.
The audience knows, though, because we see him meet Susan Harding and two of her three children at a grocery store. Before you can say, “Clean up on aisle six,” Harris and Harding are living together and engaged.
When Harding’s oldest son, Michael, arrives home from military school, he’s immediately leery of Harding. Why? Because the screenplay tells him to be. Contrived writing also positions him to overhear three conversations that add fuel to his doubts, including one scene in which he must eavesdrop on Harris talking with two different people, one outside Michael’s bedroom window and the other inside the house!
No one believes Michael when he tries to convince them
Harris might be a bad apple, even after the old lady across the street, who saw someone who looks like Harris on “America’s Most Wanted,” is killed in an apparent accident and Michael’s biological father disappears. Harding even turns a blind eye to Harris paying cash for everything and quitting his job as a Realtor when his broker asks for his Social Security number.
Even worse than the clunky script is the showdown at the end of “The Stepfather.” In one shot, Michael and Harris fall through an attic window while fighting. Harris tumbles over the edge of the roof, then leaps up and grabs Michael as the boy looks to see if Harris hit the ground. This would be impossible because during a reverse shot, one can see there was nothing for Harris to land on or hang on to after he plunged off the roof.
Not only does “The Stepfather” rely on every cliché in the book, the people who made the movie did such a poor job of executing them, all I could do was shake my head in disbelief.
E-mail David Laprad at dlaprad@hamiltoncountyherald.
com.
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