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Martin was thinking too small. The current recipe, cooked up in last year's Death Race and this week's Law Abiding Citizen, is to have some malefactor slaughter the leading character's wife and child - the love of his life and his hope for the future - as he watches helplessly. After that, any transgression, including wholesale murder, is understandable. In real life, good men may try to gulp down the black bile of their devastation and move on. They would answer Bernard Shaw's question to the 1988 Democratic candidate for President - "Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped...
...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 in prison, the other by surgically removing precious body...
Apparently Shelton - and director F. Gary Gray (Friday, The Italian Job) - spent the last decade studying movies like Death Wish, the Saw series, The Brave One, Untraceable and other examples of revenge gorenography. The genre was launched with the 1962 Cape Fear (and its John D. MacDonald source novel), whose killer not only tracks down the lawyer who prosecuted him but terrorizes the man's wife and child. The movie's sobering climax - the lawyer refuses to kill the killer, because he will not be reduced, even in extremis, to his animal impulses - was rectified in the 1991 Martin Scorsese...
Since earthquakes can't be accurately predicted or stopped, the key to preventing damage is to prepare. The death toll and destruction from a serious temblor often has less to do with the strength of the quake than with the strength of building codes and emergency-response plans. In the years since the 1989 quake, California has reinforced building codes, especially for public structures like schools and hospitals, while the state government has spent billions to improve the reliability of highways, bridges and roads. The Bay Bridge - which partly collapsed in 1989 - is being remade to handle the largest plausible...
...Also attacked were the offices of the Federal Investigation Agency (Pakistan's equivalent of the FBI), where 21 people had been killed in a March 2008 truck bombing. Four government employees and a bystander were killed there on Thursday in a 90-minute siege that ended with the death of two attackers. (See pictures of the front-line battle against the Taliban...