Script Review: Law-Abiding Citizen by Frank Darabont and Kurt Wimmer
[In lieu of actual content, for the next several weeks I will present, at least, one review of an upcoming film each week. These are scripts that I’ve been paid money to read, and many of them contain watermarking, identification numbers, password-protection, and other ways of tracking what company it was sent to; because of this and my desire to keep my job, I will not offer downloads for ANY of the scripts I review here. Don’t bother asking.]
When I first started Law-Abiding Citizen, I quickly concluded the writers had decided to make a Death Wish for the new millennium. When I finished it, I decided I’d much rather have a shitty Death Wish knockoff than Law-Abiding Citizen. The screenplay suffers from a common problem with many of the scripts hitting the market over the past year or so: genre confusion. It thinks it’s a talky psychological thriller; in reality, it’s a schlocky action movie. Had the writers embraced the proper genre, maybe some good could have come from Law-Abiding Citizen. Instead, they tried to get a little haughty and pretentious, with half-assed chess metaphors and quarter-assed stabs at ethical complexities occasionally interrupted by explosions.
Of course, it doesn’t help that the writers paint themselves into a corner by page four, shackling the story with Nick Price, a protagonist whose opening moment involves explaining that he intends to grant one murderer immunity in exchange for ratting out another. His palpable apathy toward Benson Clyde, the grieving husband and father, is honestly a little unsettling, and the writers work overtime in the first act to undo that douchebag opening gambit. They work even harder to paint eventual antagonist Clyde — the aforementioned grieving husband and father — as so cartoonishly evil, he lacks only a mustache to twirl.
The story opens with the first meeting of Nick and Clyde. After Nick explains his misguided prosecutorial plan to the confused/horrified Clyde, the story cuts ahead 10 years, to the “present.” Nick is now the doting father of a 10-year-old daughter, still working for the D.A.’s office and readying for the midnight execution of the lone convicted murderer. Things go awry: after receiving the final injection, the inmate’s blood seems to turn to acid, killing him in a very slow, tortured, inhumane way. In the frenzy to handle this bizarre emergency, the police discover the phones have been tampered with, preventing the governor from calling in at the last minute with a sentence commutation. When examining the junction box, they discover the words “His tongue will wag in hell” written on it — the same words spoken by the murderer who ratted on the executed inmate.
The rat, who has changed his name to Dunlap, is easy to find thanks to his work informing for the police. Under the assumption Dunlap had some responsibility for the execution tampering, cops (and Nick) storm his apartment. They’re all surprised by a hail of sniper fire aimed at Dunlap. Dunlap uses this distraction to flee his apartment. While running away, he receives a phone call from a mysterious man telling him how to flee, where to go. At the advice of the stranger, Dunlap busts into a police car, holds the driver hostage, and flees. Turns out: both the “cop” and the voice on the phone were Clyde. Dunlap walked right into his trap, and Clyde spends an evening torturing him to death.
The next morning is Nick’s daughter’s birthday. They receive a morning delivery, which the parents assume is a card, so they hand it to her sight unseen. Turns out it’s a DVD, and just as police and SWAT find and arrest Clyde, she pops the DVD into the player and gets an eyeful of Clyde’s white satin night of torture porn. Nick is livid, and his anger boils over when investigators discover a library of law books in Clyde’s creepy barn torture den. Clyde has apparently spent the last 10 years studying up on the definition of the words “reasonable” and “doubt” and has planned his crimes accordingly. The writers sort of ignore the whole “physical evidence” thing, which gets distracting in the age of CSI*, but nevertheless, we’re made to believe the cops have nothing concrete on Clyde. On account of he’s a fractured genius. Right.
In the script’s single least convincing scene, Clyde agrees to confess to the murders of the two men who killed his family. This is the kind of script where a scene will start with Clyde saying, “You have no evidence, so let me go,” and end with Clyde saying, “Okay, even though you still have no evidence or anything to charge me with, I’ll confess,” but nobody bats an eyelash. At any rate, they move Clyde to an old prison annex recently reopened because of overcrowding. Clyde makes his confessions but attaches a string of demands: for the first confession, he demands a comfortable bed; for the second, he demands his extensive music collection (in the script’s most amusing “unintentional comedy” moment, the lawyers balk at the weapons that could be fabricated from vinyl records and plastic CDs, so they instead provide him with an iPod, complete with a plywood shelf and extension cord charger, both of which could arguably turn into more serious weapons than a CD shard); and for directions to the body of the killers’ defense attorney, he demands a feast from a posh restaurant.
There is some intentional irony when, after balking about deadly CD shards, nobody complains about Clyde ordering a rack of lamb, full of deadly bones. Everyone’s surprised when he uses these to kill his cellmate. They’re even more surprised that he has planted bombs around the body of the defense attorney he murdered and left rotting in a field; the bombs kill and wound several FBI agents and police officers. These shenanigans lose Clyde his privileges and get him moved to solitary confinement. Meanwhile, Nick uncovers some information about Clyde: he’s an inventor who holds patents on a number of useless but moneymaking gadgets, and he has a number of bizarre property investments near chemical plants, airports, and industrial waste facilities. Also, a CIA spook informs Nick that Clyde used to work for a government think-tank, developing novel ways of murdering people. He’s a super-genius who, to borrow from their horrible chess metaphor, wins the game before you even realize you’re playing.
Now that Nick knows who he’s up against, he decides it’s time to beat Clyde at his own game. After receiving an ultimatum (release Clyde in 24 hours, or people start dying), Nick brings in forensic experts, the entire ADA team, and several interns to scour the prison for information that might help Nick solve the puzzle. It never occurs to any of these people that someone as angry at the “justice system” as Clyde would have any ill will toward the DA’s office — that is, until Clyde kills a bunch of ADAs with pre-rigged car bombs. Nick becomes obsessed with the idea that Clyde’s working with someone on the outside, and his theory is only enhanced when a bomb goes off in a hotel banquet hall where the judge who presided over the 10-year-old murder hearings had a speaking engagement. However, blunders like the many, many bombs missed by Nick and his cop friends get them all thrown off the case. Nick decides to continue the investigation on his own. He puts all the pieces together right around the time a bomb is discovered in City Hall.
I won’t spoil the ending, but I’m sure it won’t surprise you to hear that it’s just a stupid and unsatisfying as everything that came before it.
I hinted before that this script’s chief problem falls on the shoulders of its overwrought characters. I want to applaud the writers for eschewing the usual “crusader for justice” tack taken by most stories about criminal lawyers. Nick’s not a crusader for justice; he’s sort of a prick, which I’d admire if the script didn’t try so hard to make us like him. Maybe I’ll catch some shit for saying this, but remember Changing Lanes, that underrated 2003 thriller with Ben Affleck as an asshole lawyer who ends up in a battle of wits with rage-prone loser Samuel L. Jackson? I love that movie for making neither of its leads likable and never making it entirely clear what the protagonist/antagonist relationship is — like life, it’s more complicated than good vs. evil. I know I preach this all the time, but since nobody seems to listen, I guess it bears repeating: the audience does not need to be your protagonist’s best friend. We don’t have to like a character as long as we understand why they’re such assholes. The fine line between empathy and sympathy. Law-Abiding Citizen doesn’t understand this line, so they populate the first half of the script with scenes showing Nick receiving validation from colleagues over his decision to grant immunity to one murderer. They also saddle him with a wife and daughter who have no other purpose than to serve as cheap emotional devices and to create a tenuous “See, Clyde and Nick are the same!” bond.
I intended to rant about this in a full entry, but I got lazy and then forgot about it. I get really tired of movies using kids as insty-empathy. I’m not saying the idea of putting a parent’s children in jeopardy never works — in fact, I can think of several movies where it succeeds quite well (Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom would be a prime example except for the part where Indy is not Short Round’s father, so let’s go with True Lies) — but lately, it seems like writers use this as a lazy crutch. I have an easy way to spot the difference: does the child have any development whatsoever outside of a brief, shining moment in peril? If the answer is “yes,” chances are the movie isn’t horrible.
Even worse than not creating a real, fully-formed character for the child, it’s becoming commonplace that not even the adult has any real development. Here is everything we learn about Nick Price in 122 pages: he’s a lawyer, he’s sort of a dick, he has a wife and 10-year-old daughter, and he’s a tournament-level chess player. Such probing insight! I’d love to read the writers’ undoubtedly book-length bio for his character! Everything that motivates Nick has to do with putting his daughter (not even his wife, really) in jeopardy, because that doesn’t require any heavy lifting: most (it’s sad that we live in a world where I can’t say “all”) parents would react exactly as he does. As a result, he’s bland and unpleasant, yet the writers shove “we want you to like him!” moments down our throats like so many bulimic fingers.
Clyde’s an even worse case. I think they’re going for “Hannibal Lecter,” but all I heard while reading it was the baby from Family Guy — too comical and ridiculous to frighten, but too closed off to have any sort of emotional connection with the audience. This is by design: the writers want us to hate him, and they have enough sense to realize that opening with the slaughter of his wife and daughter will generate some sympathy for their villain. Instead of rolling with that and making him a little less like Snidely Whiplash than most contemporary movie villains, the writers go so far to make us hate Clyde that they allow him to cheerfully explain how he got a veterinarian to rig a bomb inside the body of a dog. He’s a complete sociopath, which at a certain point makes the idea that he’s seeking revenge ring hollow. Sociopaths don’t need revenge to motivate them.
So who’s next in the “how could the writers make this script more uninteresting” department? I hit on Nick, Clyde, Nick’s wife and daughter… Oh right, the cavalcade of cops and lawyers working with Nick, each more interchangeable than the last. They get a couple of bonus points for introducing a DA who’s slowly going blind without ever once uttering the phrase, “Justice is blind,” but they lose said bonus points for ripping off both the character and metaphor from Crimes & Misdemeanors.
I can’t even praise the action, because there’s so little (even though this follows all the beats of the schlocky ’80s and ’90s action movies I grew up loving). This has a lot of explosions, which may be pretty, but they’re the most impersonal and uninteresting method of dispatching enemies. I’m sure some of you will say, “Uhhh, Stan, what are you, stupid? Clyde spends most of the script in a jail cell — it’s not like it could be nothing but gunfights, car chases, and beating people up with French bread and sausage.” I guess my feeling is: the story doesn’t require Clyde to stay in jail the whole time. In fact, his decision to “confess” — which keeps him in the pen despite his protestation earlier in the same scene that they’d have to release him because they had no case — makes no sense, and his jail cell serves a plot twist that even the lovechild of M. Night Shyamalan and Agatha Christie would have discarded, laughing at its stupidity.
Just do me a favor and go see Whip It instead of this piece of crap. Please. You want Hollywood to make more good movies? Start seeing the few good ones they do make.
*Yes, I am more than aware of CSI’s shortcomings, but face facts: it’s long been television’s most popular show, and it has inserted itself into the public consciousness in a way that has changed the face of both television and actual criminal investigations, possibly forever. It sucks for all writers of crime fiction, but you can no longer ignore the lab. You can acknowledge it and then rapidly dismiss it, but Law-Abiding Citizen doesn’t waste its time with such frivolity. [Back]
Posted by Stan on October 12, 2009 5:09 PM | Permalink | Print-Friendly | Reviews | Digg It
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