In the outrage coup de grace, the slimy, deal-cutting rapist is allowed to accost Nick on the courthouse steps as he gets escorted back to prison, and they shake hands while a crestfallen Clyde watches from across the street.
“It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove in court,” says Nick, a perfectly logical sentiment that the film predictably finds outrageous.Īs it turns out, Nick cut a deal with the wrong man, letting the slimeball who instigated the rape and murder off with a 5-year sentence while his less culpable accomplice gets the death penalty.
#Law abiding citizen rape scene trial#
Nick explains to Clyde that the DNA evidence against the assailants is inconclusive, and with flimsy physical evidence, there is a strong possibility that a trial will result in an acquittal. This sadism is the film’s idea of a “grabber.” Fast forward a few days or so to the trial of the century, and hotshot young prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx, making me long for a couple of bars of “Georgia on My Mind”) is preparing to cut a plea deal, partially to save his perfect win-loss record in court. Clyde gets stabbed repeatedly in the chest, barely surviving his wounds, while his wife and young daughter are raped and killed in front of him. Two men break into Clyde’s house, and one of them goes over the line with sadistic relish. When the film opens, family man Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is the victim of a vicious home invasion. At one point, a character literally fiddles with the scales of justice – it’s as subtle as a giant placard pasted up with graphic pictures of aborted fetuses and quotations of scripture, but still about as complicated as we get here. But what’s even more offensive than the glorification of torture and genital mutilation as soul-nourishing therapy throughout Law Abiding Citizen is that this solemnly slate-green screed thinks it has something important to say. If that vengeance-is-blind premise was the slingshot into pure, pig-rolling-in-its-own-slop exploitation, then this might have been a sickly enjoyable travesty.
In the anti-justice morass of Law Abiding Citizen, civil rights are the things that prevent you from getting home in time for your daughter’s cello recital. It creates a universe where “fuck his civil rights” is a statement of moral evolution, where the real injustice is that American citizens can’t get convicted without representation purely on hearsay in secret trials. Gary Gray and written by Kurt Wimmer, Law Abiding Citizen takes on the American justice system with all the sound logic and sensitivity of a disgustingly inhumane, LMAO-strewn comments page rant. I only bring this up because no matter what it says on IMDB, I’m 85 to 90 percent certain that one of those protesters from my college days wrote, produced and directed the shameless 2009 pile of garbage Law Abiding Citizen. The invective was too disgusting and too explicitly targeted to forgive, yet the speaker was too evangelical in their beliefs to logically argue with, and their apparent mental illness made outrage an inappropriate response. Typically, this would take the form of a single man, sometimes accompanied by meek family members, setting up in a high-traffic area of the campus quad and screaming hellfire insults at the students until a crowd gathered. I graduated from college a little over a decade ago, but judging by a cursory Google News search, one of the most annoying and frustrating aspects of my campus experience continues to this day – the flood of confrontational and determinedly offensive far-right religious protestors on campus.
0 kommentar(er)
