Nick's adorably talented little daughter finally delights her fond parents with a cello recital – apparently none the worse for that filmic ordeal. It's silly and nasty at the same time: not a good combination. The movie is trying to be both about an ordinary guy getting payback, and about a chilling masterbrain, outwitting the police at every turn. He turns out to be both a brilliant inventor and a ruthless professional super-assassin once employed by the CIA. What is such a narrative cheat is that Clyde is, in fact, not the ordinary bloke sold to us at the beginning of the film. Clyde is incarcerated, but manages to continue his serial killings from behind bars, raising the awful possibility that someone in the system – someone who sympathises with his grievance – is helping him. The other murderer is sadistically hacked to pieces, while the proceedings are being videoed – and the DVD is sent to Nick's home so that his daughter can see it. His poisons are tampered with to make things extra-nasty.

Even the murderer getting the lethal injection isn't let off. Ten years later, Clyde begins a terrifying new campaign of revenge against anyone and everyone involved in his family's murder – including the complacent law officers.

The other will get some sort of plea bargain, and this swaggeringly unrepentant felon is out on the streets in a short while. But Clyde is told by the city's assistant prosecutor Nick Rice, played by Jamie Foxx, that only one bad guy will get the death penalty. He plays Clyde Shelton, whose nearest and dearest are blown away by two villains. In this film, in which he spends much of his time banged up, Butler rarely smiles, and when he does, he still looks a bit miffed, like Hannibal Lecter suspecting that one of his fava beans is off.īutler is the producer and star of this extremely gory and stomach-turning new picture, which comes worryingly close to revenge-torture-porn – and in which we are invited to sympathise, more than a bit, with the torturer. This is a different face from the one he uses for romcoms such as PS I Love You: the dishy and warmly gruntled expression of a dreamboat hunk. As my mother would say: Mr Butler has the look of a man who has found a penny and lost sixpence – and on rising from the pavement with that dull and disappointing copper coin in his hand, noticed his wife and child being brutally slain by scumbag criminals who will, in all probability, be cosseted by a politically correct legal system that cares more about statistics than justice. G erard Butler's big old grumpy face has loomed large on the sides of buses this week, advertising Law Abiding Citizen, his violent new thriller about revenge.

Law abiding citizen movie review