Ahhhhhh! How long has it been since I reviewed a movie? TOO LONG.
What were my choices?
Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs – No thanks, I’ve eaten and been rained on!
Couples Retreat – This would be awful, I do not doubt. Still, no.
(500) Days Of Summer – I wouldn’t mind seeing this. However, I would be afraid if I said anything negative about the movie, I would make Zooey Deschanel sad. And that, my friends, is too much burden for me to bear.
Law Abiding Citizen – YES! YES! YES!
So, I roll into LaGrange in my fashionable cobalt station-wagon. Christmas lights have been strung in the village of LaGrange, and the town is a prematurely winter wonderland.
How about those mediocre-looking pics, huh? I took them with my FUCKING PHONE! Hello, 21st Century!
So, the LaGrange is really not the friendly, very slightly grimy theater I toiled away in as the Two Buck Schmuck. They have done some quite lovely renovations. Okay, I’ll admit it. Things are different.
Remodeled lobby, with ticket enforcers
Remodeled hallway
Some restored frescoes. Yeah, fucking frescoes!
New inside theater marquee
The Bob Seger Theater was largely unaffected by the renovation. Except, instead of playing Bob Seger tonight before the movie they were playing the Temptations.
The movie choices are better now. I mean, they played the latest Hayao Miyazaki film here, for Christ’s sake. Do you know how hard it was for me to find a boilerplate revenge drama with suspect philosophical underpinnings? It wasn’t easy.
Okay, to the movie! So, Gerard Butler is this loving dad whose wife and child are killed in the first few minutes of the movie (pre-credits, even!). He spends the rest of the movie punishing the rest of the world for not properly serving up justice to the guys that killed them. I’m not sure if it was cut out in the version I watched, but the movie seemed to be missing that hilarious scene with the vibrating panties.
I knew absolutely nothing about the movie going in, so it was kind of nice wondering where it was going. It wasn’t obvious at first, at least. We flash-forward ten years and see the two thugs that did the killings die — one gets death by lethal injection (a very painful one, thanks to that sneaky Gerard), the other gets gradually amputated to death (also by Gerard). Gerard likes his justice served gradually!
Oh, Jamie Foxx is actually the star of the movie. He’s was Gerard’s lawyer. He is a hotshot lawyer. He didn’t do right by Gerard, so this movie is pretty much geared to teach Jamie Foxx that the only true way to justice is to gradually cut someone’s limbs off.
Gerard lets himself get caught, and then engineers a whole lot of mayhem from within his prison cell. Oh, before I forget, there was a “Hello, ladies!” moment in the movie. So, Gerard pretty much leads the police to himself. For whatever reason, as he is waiting for them, he strips completely down, giving the viewer a nice backside view. As he is taken from his house in custody, he is shirtless but in jeans. What the fuck? They make him put on pants, but they say, “No, a shirt will not be necessary.” I was hoping he would wink at the camera in his shirtless glory, but I guess they did not want to break the fourth wall.
So, most of the movie is just him killing lawyers and shit.
Oh, you end up finding what Gerard does (or did) for a living. He was basically a genius guy that worked for the government, figuring out ways to kill people. He was essentially an assassin. Now, the whole point of the movie, the whole motivation for his character killing all these people, is that justice was not done when his wife and child were killed. The movie *completely* misses any of the irony, that this self-righteous douchebag would in his job routinely kill people extrajudicially. The movie is totally on his side, too. The movie is like Se7en, except you are being asked to sympathize with Kevin Spacey. Yeah, man! Put Gywneth Paltrow’s head in that box!!!
Anyways, Jamie Foxx finally figures out one of Gerard’s plans, to blow up the mayor with a homemade napalm bomb. So, please bear with me — Foxx takes the bomb to Gerard’s solitary confinement cell, which Gerard is not in because he left through a tunnel he made years before being arrested to allow him to move freely from the jail to the outside world. Foxx hides the bomb in Gerard’s cell and waits for him. Gerard eventually makes it back, Foxx asks him not to detonate the napalm bomb (via a cellphone call) to kill the mayor, and Gerard says sorry, and detonates it. Then Gerard realizes the bomb is in his bed as Foxx hightails it out of the cell and locks the special fancy door Gerard built. The napalm bomb explodes, in a prison, a FULLY-POPULATED prison, mind you, killing Gerard and probably a whole lot of other inmates. Then, Jamie Foxx goes to watch his daughter play in a cello recital.
So, Jamie Foxx has learned some valuable lessons in this movie. One, you can blow bombs up in prison, and two, really, see your daughter’s recitals. They’re only young once!
