Word: shelton
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
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...
...weak and corrupt an arbiter of guilt that punishment can't be entrusted to it, or even to private contractors. (Care to make a little money on the side, Blackwater?) No, revenge is a dish best wolfed down right now, because this time it's personal. And for Shelton, the body count of retribution is "gonna be biblical" - as in the Egyptian children killed by God's decree. By midspree, and from the seemingly airtight confinement of his prison cell, Shelton has effected the violent dispatch of most of the people who had even a peripheral role in his killers...
...only takes Andrew an afternoon to befriend a like-minded, co-op-dwelling bisexual (played by the multitasking Shelton), who invites him over for an evening of drugs, dancing and experimental thinking, if not actions. Andrew persuades Ben to drop by to meet his new friend. "It's a little weird," Ben tells Anna on the phone, promising he'll be home in time for dinner. "The place is called Dionysus, and they aren't kidding." Wanting to please both friend and wife, he's torn. In the end, the desire to be as hip as he believed himself...
...Anna is also intuitive enough to understand that there is an attraction between Ben and Andrew. Most likely, it's just about personality, but Shelton suggests at times that there might be something more to it. Ben and Andrew are like a pair of little boys, pummeling each other constantly to make contact. Watching them in an angry wrestling match after a competitive basketball game, you start to think that maybe they should make out, crazy as it seems. That's the power of this subversive movie; it challenges us as much as it challenges its own characters. Humpday makes...