Law Abiding Citizen

Since 9/11, Hollywood has been resistant to give us the kind of evil geniuses who dominated genre cinema throughout the nineties, no doubt because America realised it wasn’t invulnerable to such an attack as those seen in countless action movies. The last two we saw were Bin Laden surrogate The Joker and credit crunch mastermind Miles Jackson (in the unexpectedly good 12 Rounds), so it’s refreshing to see a new, Obama age return to the days of Catherine Trammel, John Doe, Cyrus Grissom and Simon Gruber in Clyde Shelton (Butler), an imprisoned man whose vengeance upon his family’s killers sends him on a vendetta against the legal system itself (represented by Foxx). Starting out as a revenge movie, our sympathies gradually shift. Not that this is a serious morality tale: Gray’s unfussy direction and sterling turns lend conviction to an enjoyably ludicrous script, with astonishingly gory death scenes (well, producer Butler’s a Paisley man) destined for eternal life on youtube.