Word: butlering
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is the mild, happily married Philadelphian who's forced to watch his family's atrocity up close. The two killers are arrested, but assistant DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), who's wary of trying a case he might lose, cuts a deal, letting one perp testify against the other. One is condemned to death; the other gets a light sentence. Outraged and embittered, Shelton lies low for 10 years, then activates a revenge scheme that is both madly complex and simply mad. He executes the killers in approved mad-scientist fashion - one by remote control...
...might have thought to post a 24-hour guard nearby. Still, caulking those holes wouldn't help its stars bring emotional plausibility to their roles. Foxx seems both fretful and distracted; he can be a vital screen presence, but his characters need to act, not just react and endure. Butler has the showier part, but his impersonation of the tragic hero is undercut by his weird resemblance to Soupy Sales. You start hoping that Shelton will kill somebody with a custard (or puffer-fish) pie to the face...
...Abiding Citizen,” Jamie Foxx peers into Gerard Butler’s jail cell and asks him how his family would feel about the crimes he has committed. “My wife and daughter can’t feel anything,” Butler replies without missing a beat. “They’re dead.” Believe it or not, this is the film at its most profound. “Law Abiding Citizen” aspires to be a smart thriller akin to director F. Gary Gray’s last...
...story chronicles a battle of wits between Clyde Shelton (Butler) and Philadelphia lawyer Nick Rice (Foxx). A decade prior to the film’s setting, two thugs murdered Clyde’s wife and young daughter during a home invasion. In the ensuing trial, Nick cut a deal with one of the murderers in order to secure testimony against the other. Clyde was understandably opposed to Nick’s plan, so he spent the next 10 years plotting his revenge on not just the two men who murdered his family, but also on members of the justice system...
...while they are absorbing it. If you disagreed with a Safire column, fine (I usually did); but at least it got the juices flowing. And this meant, I suspect, that many of those with political views a million miles from those of Safire - to adopt W.H. Auden on William Butler Yeats - pardoned him for writing well. They missed him when he'd gone...