10/23/2009 8:10:02 PM

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In the intense new drama "Law Abiding Citizen," Gerard Butler plays a resourceful inventor who uses abject brutality to right the crimes against society. Memo to those of you who take two brochures from the "Please Take One" display rack: You had better start sleeping with one eye open.

After his wife and child are savagely killed, Clyde Shelton (Butler) is understandably incensed. One of the perpetrators is sentenced to death, the other cops a plea offered by wunderkind prosecutor Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) who believes "some justice is better than no justice." Shelton finds no consolation in that philosophy, and believing neither punishment is commensurate with the crime, metes out his own.

	2.5 Honks "Law Abiding Citizen," starring Jamie Foxx and Gerard Butler, is now playing at all area theaters. MPAA Rating: R for several good reasons. Next week: Films for the Halloween weekend.

He makes quick work of the perps -- one's lethal injection cocktail gets a little more kick than a bleeding-heart liberal might have served, the other is the leading man in his "this is what happens to bad guys" After School Special. Shelton doesn't stop there. After he's arrested for exacting vengeance, he targets the flawed judicial systems and those he believes were complicit in his family's deaths: the defense attorney, the soft judge, legal assistants and ultimately, the mayor. But how is Shelton orchestrating the hits from his prison cell?

The revenge genre is one of the few guilty pleasures left. While we openly abhor violence and the cruel and unusual punishment of its purveyors, we somehow find it satisfying when Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey blows away the scum of the city in "Death Wish," a gender-neutral phenom, by the way, as Jodie Foster demonstrated in "The Brave One." In both of those films, the system was impotent and the hero merely dispensed quick justice. Those films worked.

Unfortunately, "Law Abiding Citizen" goes too far. We can empathize with Shelton's grief, acknowledge the inadequacies of the judicial system, and even support the position Matthew McConaughey espoused in "A Time to Kill" that "the only problem with the death penalty is that we do not use it enough." But when Shelton's executions turn sadistic, he loses us.

Plot holes don't help, either. Midway through the film, we learn Shelton has some special government training that lets him take lives from a distance -- a prison cell, for instance -- which makes this a sort of "Silence of the Lambs" only without the overhead of an excellent script.

To be fair, Jamie Foxx does a fine job and the film is riveting and intense, but it takes a strong stomach to get past the violence, even when it's justified.

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