Whether he’s savoring a steak (delivered in exchange for info about a victim’s whereabouts) or, in the pic’s most galvanizing moment, telling off a judge, Butler gives the picture a pulse and keeps it throbbing steadily through the first hour, which shamelessly feeds the viewer’s own appetite for revenge.īutler makes such a charismatic villain/antihero that you never quite stop rooting for him, which is a credit to the performance but also a dramatic handicap - one that serves to show how disposable the good guys are, even those played by such sterling character vets as Bruce McGill, Colm Meaney and Viola Davis.ĭirector F. Just as Nick is outwitted again and again by Clyde, so top-billed Foxx is overmatched here by Butler - who, even if he can’t quite make sense of an impossible character (a loving husband and father warped by unspeakable trauma into a one-man WMD), clearly relishes the challenge. Like a younger, hunkier Hannibal Lecter, Clyde plays nasty mind games, makes ludicrous demands and is in every way determined to shake the foundations of so-called law and order.

But elsewhere, “Citizen” proves startlingly graphic, even by R-rated standards as Clyde’s killing spree continues, now targeting the key players in the decade-old murder case, one starts watching every scene in nervous anticipation that heads or SUVs might explode without warning.Įven after he’s apprehended and locked up, Clyde remains 10 steps ahead of everyone else, including Nick, who tries in vain to stop this homicidal mastermind. True torture-porn aficionados will be disappointed, as editor Tariq Anwar cuts away right before blade meets flesh - a move that feels a tad, well, gutless under the circumstances.

But that’s not good enough for Clyde, who waits 10 long years for vengeance - and well worth the wait it is, as he abducts Darby and lays him out on an operating table apparently on loan from the “Saw” prop department. Unable to convict both killers due to insufficient evidence, prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), a careerist accustomed to compromise, arranges a deal with one of the perps, Darby (Christian Stolte), so he can send the other to death row. Exactly how and why Clyde survives the senseless assault is left unexamined by Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay, which quickly abandons the scene of the crime in favor of a longer stay in legal chambers, where matters of guilt and innocence aren’t quite so cut-and-dried.

Two men break into the home of Philadelphia family man Clyde Shelton (Butler), who’s forced to watch helplessly as they murder his wife and young daughter. Wasting no time, the pic plunges the viewer immediately into a horrific yet unprotracted domestic bloodbath.

Gerard butler body law abiding citizen