Trailer Watch: Law Abiding Citizen

Earlier this year myself and some buddies on Twitter played a game called #nicerfilmtitles. As its title suggests, the game all about taking the name of popular films and making them, well, nicer. For example, The Empire Strikes Back becomes The Empire Writes A Strongly Worded Letter. The Day the Earth Stood Still becomes The Day the Earth Stood Relatively Still While Gently Swaying in the Breeze. The Exorcism of Emily Rose becomes The Daily Exercising of Emily Rose.

But there are some film titles that already sound so inoffensive, so pedestrian that making them substantially nicer is no easy task because the producers appear to have preempted the process. The first example that pops into my mind is (bizarrely) To Wong Foo Thanks For Everything, Julie Newmar. Sure, you could add Thanks So Much For Everything, but that’s hardly the point…

The title of Jamie Fox and Gerard Butler’s new movie Law Abiding Citizen is an undramatic and uneventful slice of nothing that is simply way too bloomin’ nice. How can one make it nicer – a Very Law Abiding Citizen? Running with this title is a decision that boggles the mind. What were the producers thinking? There is something pathetically mundane about the way the following imaginary conversation rolls off the tongue:

“Hey mate, whatcha up to tonight?”
“Goin’ to see Law Abiding Citizen.”
“Oh yeah, isn’t that the movie about the, um, citizen? The law abiding one?”

Ahem. More bizarre still is the fact that Law Abiding Citizen is an action/thriller, not some character study about a docile old fart who spies on his neighbours, keeping track of whether they’re violating arcane council regulations. By the looks of things – watch the trailer below – there are meaty murder-by-glare grimaces, explosions and death scenes a-plenty. These things are least deserve a more arresting title.

The trailer begins with flashes of a home break-in: Clyde (Gerard Butler) is bound and gagged and, we learn shortly after, watches helplessly as his wife and daughter are brutally murdered. Jamie Fox plays Assistant DA Nick Rice, who is assigned the case and ordered to make a deal that will sentence one of the killers to the death penalty and the other to ten years in the slammer. Outraged, Clyde shrieks “no deal!” Andrew O’Keefe style but Nick goes ahead with it anyway – “some justice is better than no justice at all,” he says. Bad move. Clyde turns out to be a brilliant sociopath who waits ten years, takes the law into his own hands and then for some inexplicable reason apparently trains his sights on Nick and his family.

Nick is the only man that can stand in the way of Clyde’s nefarious crusade for justice but this time it’s personal a yada yada and so on and so forth etcetera etcetera.

There is one deliriously audacious dialogue exchange during which Butler, in jail looking in need of a nap and a hug, demands Fox organise his release.

“Or what?” Fox enquiries.
“Or I kill…everyone!

Everyone? Like the whole world everyone? That’s a pretty ambitious target, but brilliant movie sociopaths do have a tendency to reach for the stars. Good on him, I say. Since Clyde’s the one with all the ambition, perhaps the movie could have been named after him. Law Breaking Citizen, perhaps?

Law Abiding Citizen will be released Australia January 28.