[usr 4]
A frustrated man decides to take justice into his own hands after a plea bargain sets one of his family’s killers free. He targets not only the killer but also the district attorney and others involved in the deal.
Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is a loving husband and father whose life is turned upside down when two men force their way into his home, tying him up and injuring him in the process, so all he can do is watch helplessly as his wife and daughter are brutally murdered in front of him. After the two men are eventually caught, his attorney, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), informs him that one of the men, Clarence Darby (Christian Stolte), is willing to testify against the other man, Rupert Ames (Josh Stewart), in exchange for a lesser sentence. Nick agrees and later informs Clyde of the decision he made. Clyde disagrees and is willing to take his chances in court, believing a jury would side with him and send both men to death row but Nick is far more interested in his 96% conviction rate, rather than taking a chance in court and losing.
Unable to dissuade Nick, the deal is made, Darby goes to prison, and five years later, he is released. Ten years after the court case, Nick and one of his assistants attend the execution of Rupert Ames and right up to his death, he claims that Darby killed Clyde’s wife and daughter, not him. When he is finally injected, he has a violent and bloody reaction to the chemicals and dies a slow and painful death. Later on, they discover that the chemicals had been switched, thereby causing Ames to die horribly. When Darby receives a phone call, alerting him to the fact that the police are looking for him in connection with Ames’ brutal murder, the voice on the other end of the phone helps him escape to a waiting car but unbeknownst to Darby, the voice is none other than Clyde. After paralyzing him with poison, he passes out, only to wake up some time later in an old abandoned warehouse. He is tied to a table and Clyde brutally murders him, dismembering him slowly, limb by limb.
When the police discover Darby’s body, records show that Clyde actually owns the building and they arrest him. Once inside, Nick tries to outsmart him by demanding a confession but over the years since they last met, Clyde has learned all about the legal system and proves to be more than a match for Nick. When Clyde states that he will give a full confession if Nick swaps out his cell mattress with a lush new one, Nick refuses, but after his boss demands he comply so that they can get the confession, he finally agrees and Clyde confesses to Darby’s and Ames’ murders. But just when Nick thinks he has won another conviction, one by one, the team he worked with on Clyde’s case, mysteriously start dying, and it’s only a matter of time before Nick is the last man standing. With time running out, Nick must discover how Clyde is killing everyone around him, and whether he is working with an accomplice on the outside, or something more inconceivable.
The movie had to be re-cut many times over because of the amount of violence but it is well-suited to the overall narrative, showing just how broken the American judicial system really is. Butler starts out as a loving husband and father but after their deaths, over time, he becomes exasperated and resentful that his family was not given the justice they deserved so he takes matters into his own hands. The main issue I had with the film was Jamie Foxx’s pretentious and egotistic Nick Rice. More concerned with his almost perfect conviction rate, I am sure there are many attorneys in real life just like him but as his team members start dying off, I’m sure the intent was for the audience to have empathy for him, to root for him to fight back and win, but that was not the case. I found myself rooting for Butler’s Clyde instead and it isn’t until the very final scene, after everyone close to Nick is dead, that he finally understands the importance of family and doing the right thing, even if it means sometimes failing but he doesn’t comprehend this until the very end and by then it is too late. If he had come to this conclusion earlier on, I might have had compassion for him but as it stands, all I felt for him was contempt and an overall desire to see him fail. In the end, maybe that is what the filmmakers were going for, to root for the antagonist and scold the protagonist. If that was their objective, they succeeded.
Available on 4K Ultra HD Tuesday, November 6th
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