Directed by F Gary Gray

Family man Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler)'s wife and child are brutally murdered in front of him, and when his lawyer (Jamie Foxx) for the sake of getting a conviction, comes to an agreement with the worse of the two guilty men to get him off execution, Clyde is not happy. Not happy at all. Ten years later, not only does he take out revenge on the guilty men, but launches an onslaught on the whole criminal justice system that's let him down.

Quite an undertaking, and the film devotes itself to discovering how he might be doing the apparently impossible, and what he'll do next. It's a pity a film like this feels it had to try to play with the big boys and give us scenes of gratuitous nastiness, including sexual violence and graphic torture, when what it is at heart is pure old fashioned hokum. So what you get is a rather unbalanced, bizarre hybrid of Se7en and The Italian Job, not quite satisfying, I would think, to the audience of either.

Bulter's OK at playing mean, but the role doesn't ask a lot of him. Jamie Foxx is a nice middle class daddy, a contrast to what has become of Clyde's original persona (though it turns out it wasn't so simple as we imagined), and Colm Meaney is dependably good to watch as the police chief. It has some good though preposterous ideas, but rather runs out of steam for the grand denoument, as if the writers couldn't quite come up with a sufficiently big show to wrap it all up.

Seen at Cinema Days, Empire Cinema, Rubery, Birmingham, 3 October 2009