Here’s the brief pitch of Law Abiding Citizen: after his family gets killed and one of the murderers goes free for rolling over on the other one, crazy tactical genius Gerard Butler spends 10 years setting up traps and planning to take revenge on not only the killers but everyone involved who failed him in the prosecution of his family’s killers. It’s basically the story of a supervillain. And a damn good one at that because Butler plans for nearly everything. It turns out he worked for a government think tank that tasked him with developing ways to kill certain bad guys and he excelled like crazy. Everything he does has been planned out to the Nth degree and only thanks to his hubris does he get caught in the end.

But, like I said, it’s basically the story of how a supervillain became a supervillain. He’s got all the angles figured out, has all kinds of tech at his disposal and even a ton of warehouses that he uses as his secret lairs. All that being said, the movie does require quite a bit of belief suspension. There are a lot of dumb parts in the movie that don’t follow logic. Why doesn’t Jamie Foxx’s daughter turn off the DVD of a man getting tortured to death? Why do the cops aim their guns at the recently exploded car and not the direction that the rocket came from? Why doesn’t someone just shoot this guy in the face (especially considering the overly complicated ending which probably caused more collateral damage than Butler’s entire rampage.

That being said, I only found myself coming out of the story a few times with “what the?” moments, many of which are nit picky, but they are sloppy and should have been cleaned up. SPOILER WARNING I will say that I thought that Trick ‘r Treat and Iron Man’s Leslie Bibb was Butler’s man on the inside about 40 minutes before the movie ended. Then, not soon after, she died. It was a fiery car bomb death that I assumed was fake and kept on watching the movie because I hadn’t thought at that time that Butler would out-Prison Break Michael Scofield and he was really operating on his own. So, thanks to my paranoia, Bibb’s death held no emotional weight for me. Ah well, it’s not a home run, but it’s a fun little movie to watch when you’ve got some free time and want to see a Saw-like series of killings with a villain who’s got some interesting things to say.