Never Answer Your Cellphone After Being Glib: The Prime Lesson of 'Law Abiding Citizen' [SPOILERS]

Just saw F. Gary Gray's Law Abiding Citizen for the first time.  Just in case you haven't seen it, here's a quick summary:

For never fully explained reasons, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is attacked by two men and is forced to watch the rape and slaughter of his family. During the trial a deal is cut by D.A. Nick Rice (Jamie Fox) that sends the lesser of the two criminals to death row, and lets the main offender walk after a few years in prison. This does not sit well with Clyde. He spends the next decade forming an intricate plan that allows him bloody revenge against the killers. Then he sets his sights on Nick, his colleagues, and the justice system itself. The interesting twist is that Clyde is somehow performing the second act of his vengeance from behind bars after he is captured for killing the men who took his family.

After mulling over the film and re-reading Allen's excellent review (from which the above summary is derived), I am struck with a few opinions of my own:

First, as a disaffected lawyer who thinks the justice system is FUBAR, I was totally behind Clyde (Gerard Butler) the whole time. You see, Foxx's character let the guy who actually raped and killed Clyde's wife off with three years, while getting the vapid accomplice the death penalty.  When Clyde explains that he could identify them and get them both convicted, Foxx shrugs it off, saying that he blacked out and his ID wouldn't hold up in court (we actually see the attack, and know that's not true -- Clyde sees everything while conscious).  Foxx was a jerk who just wanted an easy conviction, and clearly is just not paying attention to the facts of the case (not knowing which baddie is worse, when Clyde and the accomplice both know, is chief among them).

I'd heard some people call the movie morally ambiguous, since you kind of want to root for the baddie (See also our Salt reviews - mine, Allen's, Aaron's for more on this topic), but then eventually shift away as the baddie does something irredeemable. . . or not [that's why we call it "ambiguity"].  Clyde does some things that are irredeemable (killing way more people than he actually needs to), but I was still rooting for him anyway. Now, I don't agree with murder (going out on a limb there, right?), but the points Clyde makes are essentially right. He just goes about it the wrong way. Plus, I just wanted someone to wipe that smug look off of Foxx's face.

Second, this movie is an interesting experiment in movie hybridization. Allen says that it's a mash-up of Hard to Kill, Saw II, and The Life of David Gale, and that might be completely accurate (I haven't seen any of these), but the first thing I thought of was Seven, like, if it were written by John Grisham.  Just like creepy Kevin Spacey (did that character have a name?), Clyde is a nutter who has seriously masterminded a complicated and well-managed plan to make a (perhaps questionable) moral point. Each step in the plan is more devastating than the next, so the film makes you really anticipate (which is one of the best things a film can do). But unlike what happens in Seven, Clyde's plans don't actually work out so well.

Speaking of that -- This movie ends the wrong way - big time.  We find out that Clyde is supposed to be the brains behind a spy organization, so he basically can kill you anywhere, anytime. He is a super-genius who has been working on this for ten years, and some of it is really creative and intricate. Then, inexplicably, Foxx's character, who is really, really stupid (really), suddenly outsmarts him.  Presumably, this is because Foxx is a good guy and Clyde is a bad guy.

The right ending of this movie would have been if Clyde, after basically letting himself get caught, sitting in prison pulling everyone's strings, and killing people right in the open, was able to get himself off on a technicality at the very end (I thought somehow creating some sort of clever Fruit of the Poisonous Tree set-up would have been really smart), thus proving to everyone that he's right by making them suffer the same way he has, and then walk out of prison and force Foxx's character to stand by the system he believes in, or take justice into his own hands (probably by killing Clyde -- Become Wrath!).

Instead, the movie kills Clyde anyway, and Foxx's character has to do a couple illegal things to make it happen, and yet Foxx's character gets off scott free -- the movie ends limply with Foxx enjoying his daughter's cello recital.  Lame.