My therapist says I need to express my rage more, rather than keeping it bottled up inside me. So this seems as good a time as any to talk about a piece of pent-up anger that has been festering inside me ever since I saw this fucking monstrosity one sunny October day four years ago.

It opens auspiciously enough: Gerard Butler is a happy family man with a wife and daughter and his life is peaches and gravy. Then a couple of men bust in his door, tie him up, and brutally rape his wife and daughter to death before robbing the house. And you’re like, ok, I can support this, it’s the start to Death Wish 27.

Flash forward a bit, the murderers are caught but the evidence isn’t rock solid, so the district attorney, played by Jamie Foxx, says they need to cut a deal. One of the murders will testify against the other one. The second murderer will get the death penalty, and the first murderer will have a rubber band put around his wrist, have it snapped very roughly, and then be free to go. A tearful Gerard Butler pleads for Foxx not to take the deal because after all a rubber band snap isn’t really fitting punishment for the guy who raped his family to death, but Foxx makes the deal. We also learn that this is mostly due to Foxx having an unbroken string of court victories that he doesn’t want to jeopardize. Ok, so Foxx is a slimy little piece of shit lawyer scum. Got it.

Flash forward a few more years and Murderer #2 is getting lethal injection’d to death. However, someone has tampered with the chemical cocktail and instead of him going peacefully to sleep dreaming of puppies and unicorns or maybe being sodomized by demons in the fiery pits of hell, he’s actually injected with a combination of Drano and paint stripper and dies in unspeakable agony. Shortly afterward, Gerard puts together a plan to kidnap Murderer #1, chain him to a table, and slowly and methodically cut him up into puzzle shaped pieces while videotaping the event for posterity. And the audience is like, fuck yeah! I can accept this, because they suck!

Leonidas is promptly captured by the police and put into an actual prison, even though you’re typically kept in jail, not prison, until you you’re convicted, but hey, I can stand a little artistic license. He then reveals his true plan: he’s pissed off at the ineffectual and corrupt judicial system and plans to bring it down, bit by bit, by murdering all of the key players in the clusterfuck that let his family’s murderer go. Despite being in prison. The rest of the movie is a cat and mouse game between the fuzz trying to figure out how the phantom in the prison is able to keep killing people in a variety of extremely creative yet increasingly implausible ways while trying to nail Gerard for the crimes he’s already committed. There are plenty of flaws, logical implausibilities, and plot holes big enough to drive a truck through, but the movie is entertaining enough that for the most part you don’t notice them. It’s really the ending that drives me up the fucking wall.

See, every well-done vigilante movie is, at its heart, a moral quandary about what is the right thing to do. Is it morally acceptable and right for a good person to kill a bad person? To what extent should anyone go outside the law and take matters in their own hands? Or should they do it at all? Law Abiding Citizen is no different, except it’s made a bit more interesting because the vigilante is targeting the corrupt judicial system itself, the very organization designed to enforce the laws and keep bad guys from doing bad things. Not to mention that the vigilante, even when he starts taking things a bit too far, looks like this:

And the DA, on the other hand, is played by a smarmy Jamie Foxx with a stick up his ass.

Anyway, for the explosive climax, Gerard plants a bomb inside City Hall to take out a bunch of bureaucrats and then sneaks back inside his prison cell through his underground tunnel that he’s dug to come and go as he pleases. You’d wonder why he bothers going BACK to prison when he clearly has the means and knowledge to stay free outside of prison and it would in fact make everything that he’s doing far easier without needing to sneak in and out of prison every fucking time, but that would be applying logic. Anyway, surprise! Turns out Team Jamie Foxx has discovered the tunnel and Foxx is waiting inside the cell. There’s some dialogue and eventually Gerard asks if they’re going to make another deal and in a moment of high drama Foxx says that he no longer makes deals with murderers, which is a lesson he learned from Gerard. And you’re like, fuck yeah, finally this douchenozzle gets it! Then Foxx pleads with Gerard not to set off the detonator because it’s a mistake he’ll have to live with for the rest of his life but Gerard sets it off anyway and then Foxx slams the door and runs like shit because it turns out Foxx found the bomb in City Hall and brought it back to jail, and stuffed it, still armed, under Gerard’s bed. Which logically doesn’t make any sense because Jamie wouldn’t know that the bomb wasn’t on a timer and wouldn’t explode any minute, killing anyone who happened to be around, but anyway, the bomb goes off and Gerard dies and Foxx watches his daughter play a musical instrument, roll credits.

What. The actual. Fucking. Fuck.

This ending is all the worse because it comes on the tail end of a movie that’s actually enjoyable, and there’s that horrible letdown, kinda like that scene in The Shining where Jack Nicholson is making out with the hottie and then she turns into a disease-ridden corpse? Like that. Except worse. Because it undercuts everything that the entire movie had been working on.

See, Jamie Foxx’s point that he’s been trying to make the entire movie is that if you’re a good person, you should be doing things the right way. That’s the lesson that he finally actually supposedly takes to heart, towards the end, where he says that he doesn’t make deals with murderers anymore. But instead, he doesn’t. He becomes a murderer himself. Why? No fucking reason. He has Gerard dead to rights. They know all his secrets. They could put him in a proper cell, under 24-hour-surveilliance, charge him, imprison him, and do things the right way. There is absolutely no reason to do what he did. But instead, Foxx decides, fuck it, why not blow the guy up and completely invalidate everything that I’ve been working on for the entire fucking movie, thus validating Gerard’s point about sometimes needing to subvert the law, except Foxx has just murdered the guy who was making that point in the first place!

I get some solace knowing that despite the movie ending with Jamie Foxx and his hot wife watching his daughter play an instrument that in real life, there’d be an inquiry into why instead of calling the bomb squad Foxx decided to sneak the bomb into a prison and blow up a prisoner who’d never been convicted of anything, as well as most of the solitary confinement ward, and Foxx would be arrested for murder and be sent to prison himself, but honestly, even that doesn’t bring me much joy. It’s a movie that, in the final ten minutes, decides to squat down and take a huge, steaming, festering shit over the entire preceding film and the audience as well.

1/10 would not watch again.