Law Abiding Citizen

Taking the law into your own hands, frustrated by the deals and dilemmas necessitated by the nature of the legal system: it's pay back time. In F. Gary Gray's Law Abiding Citizen, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) refuses to accept the compromise which frees one of his wife (Brooke Mills) and daughter's (Ksenia Hulayev) killers (Christian Stolte as Clarence Darby) after only 5 years and strikes back with a full on blitzkrieg. His object of vengeance is principally lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) but his methods seek to "incarcerate" anyone associated with the original trial. His goal: teach Rice that you don't make deals with murderers. His methodology: take out anyone and everyone responsible. As a work of fiction, Law Abiding Citizen works well insofar as the ending champions an either/or legal system where the ambiguous dimension structuring day to day judicial decision making is severely criticized (and the either/or mentality is fictionalized). However, if it is stating that this either/or mentality should be adopted, then, from a more practical point of view, the ending becomes problematic. One way out of this predicament is to firmly interpret the ending as a situation where Shelton represents the subjective rogue, Rice, the objective standard. Rice can apply his objective standards generally aside from situations where he encounters the subjective rogue, situations wherein there is no compromise due to the designs of the rogue's ambitions. But if this dimension is being fictionalized then Gray supports a system where Rice can only apply his objective standards to situations where there is no compromise, thereby making the exception the universal and leading us back to the high and low imbroglio. Whether or not Shelton wanted Rice to kill him in the end is ambivalent as well: did Rice truly outsmart Shelton or was Shelton expecting Rice to outsmart him? Was he simply prepared for both options? Does this layer of ambivalence suggest that Gray is fictionalizing the ambiguous dimension of legal proceedings in order to applaud an objective either/or system which is subtly yet directly presented? Either it's an ambiguous ending or it's not, or perhaps the ending is both ambiguous and polar. You decide.