7:04pm Monday 30th November 2009
Running time: 108 mins. Starring: Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Bruce McGill, Leslie Bibb, Viola Davis, Regina Hall, Emerald-Angel Young, Brooke Mills, Ksenia Hulayev. Director: F. Gary Gray.
Justice is blind — and by the end of F Gary Gray’s gruesome thriller, it’s also horribly burned, dismembered and disembowelled as a family man (Gerard Butler) turns the tables on the lawmakers who let him down, with the help of his good friend Semtex.
The moral conundrum that underpins Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay is constantly obscured by graphic violence and relentlessly sadistic revenge fantasies played out by the central character on the denizens of Philadelphia.
His corruption at the hands of an unfair justice system and subsequent quest for retribution are supposed to blur the lines between good and evil, but the protagonists aren’t sketched in sufficient detail to carry the story’s convictions.
Butler’s brilliant inventor exacts bloody revenge on the prosecutor (Jamie Foxx) who agrees a plea bargain with one of the men who killed his wife and daughter.
Scenes between them lack tension as both actors go through the motions — justice is bland.
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