As it happens, Nick is also a loving husband with his own sweet young daughter, thereby encouraging us to draw parallels between the compromising law enforcer and the erstwhile law abider. Of course, the temple in question is the judicial system - judges, defence lawyers and, primarily, Nick the deal-making prosecutor. But the anti-hero has just begun, a fact that can be safely gleaned from his enthusiastic assertion that, "I'm gonna bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down. Gary Gray treats us to the results of this carpentry - all 25 fleshy pieces, some bearing rudely interrupted tattoos. Re-enter our vigilante Clyde who, in the first of many elaborately plotted escapades, tracks down the baddie and, with Dexter-like precision, subjects him to a slow death by skill saw. Released, the big thug is enjoying his freedom with the usual blowsy tart. And eventually gets even.Ĭut to 10 years later. The consequence: Nick gets his convictions.
The killers are caught and brought to a Philadelphia courtroom by Nick the district attorney (Jamie Foxx), who negotiates a plea bargain: The thug-in-chief - a tattooed uber-villain of giant girth and dubious hygiene - receives a reduced sentence in return for testifying against his accomplice, ensuring him the death penalty. Only he survives the ordeal, and soon faces a further horror. Two thugs invade the house of good citizen Clyde (Gerard Butler), a loving husband and father who finds himself stabbed, his wife raped and his young daughter assaulted. Make that crimsonly quaint, since the pre-credit violence sets the premise in bloody close-up. Indeed, in an era when the debate has shifted from too little state vigilance to too damn much, this thing seems almost quaint. LawAbiding Citizen smells a bit musty these days. For example, the TV seriesĭexter tapped neatly into the temper of the Bush era, featuring a nice-guy serial killer who only tortures and slaughters those who profoundly deserve their fate. It's popular at times when electioneering pols, aided by the eager media, are raising alarms about crime and punishment, insisting that the system has grown lax in its zeal to corral the wicked and guarantee our security. Gauging the shifting winds of fear and prejudice, the vigilante flick is often a good barometer of the social climate.
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