PCP on DVD - Law Abiding Citizen

It’s time for your next hit of PCP:  Pop Culture Panorama.  Today I will be talking about the film Law Abiding Citizen, which I finally got around to clearing from my Netflix queue.

Review:  Law Abiding Citizen.  Rating:  2.5 out of 5 stars. 

I wanted to love this movie.  It stars Jamie Foxx, who is awesome in most everything he does, and Gerard Butler who used to be awesome.  He was King Leonidas in 300 for crying out loud, but lately he's been choosing some pretty bad movies (this, Gamer, the Ugly Truth, and the Bounty Hunter).  Filling out the rest of the cast are some familiar faces including Colm Meaney (O’Brien on Star Trek: TNG & DS9) as a detective involved in the case, Bruce McGill (Collateral, Runaway Jury, My Cousin Vinny) as the district attorney that Jamie Foxx works under, and Leslie Bibb (Iron Man 1 and 2) as the required eye candy for a movie like this to have, but their characters are rather two-dimensional and not really any focus of the plot at all.  The plot is pretty conventional - guy's family gets killed, guy goes for revenge, and the system is so messed up he has to take justice into his own hands.  Only been done 100 times before.  They try something new, to make it a mystery as to how he's still killing people on the outside, while locked up in jail.  I don't want to blow the ending yet, but basically it is somewhat lame and filled with the mother of all plot holes.  Although there were a few good creative kills in this movie, ultimately this movie could have been so much better than it was, and because it was disappointing, it only gets an average score.  Watch it if you've got nothing better to do, but pass it up if there's anything else on.

SPOILER ALERT:  only keep reading past here if you've already seen the movie, as I will now discuss the ending.  Again, SPOILER ALERT- as reading past this point will tell you the ending of the movie so you've been warned.

My main problem with the ending of the film was the whole premise as to how he was killing people while in jail.  Over the 10 years he was plotting his revenge, he tunnelled in to the prison that he knew he'd be held at, creating tunnels to every cell in the solitary wing.  Here's my problem with how stupid this is:  What if the jail closed?  That happens all the time - in fact some of the filming was at a jail that had been closed for budget cuts.  What if his tunnels were discovered?  If they've been there for so long, someone could have stumbled on it.  Why bother with the whole jail thing in the first place?  If you're some sort of super assassin, why not just kill everyone and be done with it, without getting arrested in the first place?  Just kill everyone, send a manifesto to the press explaining why you did what you did, and then go drink on a tropical beach in a country without extradition to the U.S. for the rest of your life. 

Reminder:  if you want to see my rating history (1-10 scale) of every movie I’ve ever seen, you can see it here:  http://www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=1099042