Law Abiding Citizen (futuremovies.co.uk)

This slab of big, dumb, glossy pap has an interesting idea at its core. The innocent man wronged is a movie mainstay, and we’ve seen his kind battling against the odds for some kind of personal justice time and again. But what if, unlike Harrison Ford in The Fugitive, or Tom Cruise in Minority Report, the wronged man lost his own sense of right and wrong somewhere along the way, and became an amoral monster, driven to mete out disproportionate measures of wrath to anyone and everyone? If it were done well, that could be a pretty terrifying movie. If it were done badly, it would be Law Abiding Citizen.

The film positively glistens with stupidity from its opening moments. If director F. Gary Gray’s lack of interest in believable characters isn’t obvious from the speed with which Gerard Butler’s motivation is supposedly established, it becomes unmissable after Jamie Foxx’s lawyer appears on the scene, making some ridiculous and irrational choices that conveniently fuel Butler’s growing sense of injustice. Cut to 10 years later and Butler’s had time to set up so many elaborate ways of killing people that even Saw’s Jigsaw would stand up and applaud.

Granted, there is a certain amount of mindless fun to be had with this kind of film. I enjoy seeing Butler get his maniacal grimace on and deliver lines like “I’ll kill everyone… it’s gonna be biblical” as much as the next Spartan. But when Viola Davis, who gave a jaw-dropping, Oscar-nominated single-scene performance in last year’s Doubt, is so inexcusably wasted by a director as she is here, then we are dealing with something much more dangerous than a mere guilty pleasure. This is an all-out assault on decent cinema.

You can actually feel yourself losing intelligence as Law Abiding Citizen moves interminably towards its meaningless conclusion, and my advice, if you have the misfortune to end up in a theatre where it's playing, is get out while you can. Avoid this drivel at all costs.

2/10

Law Abiding Citizen is in UK cinemas from 27th November. This review first appeared on futuremovies.co.uk.

The Soloist

Joe Wright takes some large leaps out of the comfort zone with his third film. Following two very successful and very British period pieces - Pride and Prejudice and Atonement – he jumps across the water and into the present day to tell a story based on real events, and in the process reveals a side of Los Angeles seldom seen on the big screen.

The Soloist has taken a while to arrive in British cinemas, after failing to make much of an impact at the American box office in April this year. It’s not hard to see why the film struggled, as while it appears from the marketing to be a predictable drama about friendship overcoming great odds, with all the usual emotional button-pressing you would expect, Wright’s film is anything but that. In telling how LA Times columnist Steve Lopez first encountered homeless musician Nathaniel Ayres, and investigating the unique relationship that developed between the two men, Wright presents a complicated, subtle and realistically open-ended story. Under Wright's direction, these characters take the story on several unexpected detours, and a lot of issues surface that Wright isn’t satisfied in giving simple 'movie solutions' to.

Robert Downey Jr is always very watchable, and here he is restrained and believable as Lopez, convincingly showing the character's delight at discovering Ayres and his simultaneous reticence to take responsibility for him. Jamie Foxx is close to unrecognisable as the mentally unstable Ayres, inhabiting the character in a performance that goes much deeper than outward tics and traits. Good as they are though, it’s the fact that Wright never showcases their performances, and instead brings his themes – homelessness, selflessness, friendship, faith (to name a few) - to the fore, that makes The Soloist great.

The Soloist is released on 25th September.