Several months later, the criminals are awaiting trial and the assistant D.A. Then his young daughter is taken into another room for a similar treatment. The next thing he knows, he's barely conscious, gagged, and bound, and is forced to watch as his wife is raped and killed. Thinking it's a takeout delivery, Clyde carelessly opens the door and is whacked in the head with a bat. The movie opens with a sequence as grim and upsetting as one is likely to find in a mainstream movie: engineer Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is enjoying a quiet evening at home with his wife and daughter when the pleasant domestic scene is interrupted by the sound of someone knocking. So it takes a simple revenge fantasy and uses it as the core of an elaborate high-stakes game that, in shooting for 'inventive,' ends up hitting 'preposterous.' The more Kurt Wimmer's screenplay reveals about the lead character's scheme, the more difficult it is to believe that Law Abiding Citizen is intended to be taken seriously. Unfortunately, Law Abiding Citizen isn't content to be a Death Wish for 2009. Gary Gray's thriller works on a purely visceral level, offering a degree of guilty satisfaction to viewers as one sleazy individual after another gets eliminated in a gruesome, Saw-esque manner. The premise of Law Abiding Citizen - angry father seeks revenge on the system when his daughter's murderer gets off with a light sentence - probably sounded great in the pitch meetings but, as with all high concept motion pictures, the devil's in the details.

Jamie foxx law abiding citizen