Law Abiding Citizen (2009): C+

A titular hyphen isn’t the only thing missing from Law Abiding Citizen – logic is also in woefully short supply. One of the year’s most willfully inane Hollywood blockbusters, F. Gary Gray’s tale is basically a legal-themed variation on Saw. The story revolves around a seemingly average husband and father named Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) who – ten years after his wife and child are slain, and one of the two criminals walks thanks to a plea deal negotiated by district attorney Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) – goes on a trap-heavy killing spree in order to teach Nick and his cronies the true meaning of justice. The twist is that Clyde carries out his plot while in jail, using a variety of devices so blatantly nonsensical that the action quickly tips over into campiness, which is further amplified by the self-seriousness with which the material addresses issues of fairness and virtue. Law Abiding Citizen is the type of rubbish that asks one to believe that Clyde, stuck in solitary confinement, could somehow manage (without an accomplice’s aid) to boobytrap a judge’s cell phone with a secret bullet-firing mechanism that he could trigger whenever he fancies, an outrageous bit of nonsense typical of the proceedings. And yet other than a third act dragged down by ponderous stabs at gravity, Gray’s film is so wholly unaware of its own idiocy – and that goes for Foxx and Butler too, who sell their roles with undeserved intensity – that it proves a frequently hilarious, mildly entertaining genre throwaway, as well as a prototypical example of the way in which bad movies only become good bad movies unintentionally.