Posts tagged Stephanie Humphrey

Disappointing Ending

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN is a thriller with a theme about revenge, it has good execution, fine special effects, but a lousy ending that doesn’t satisfy what has gone before it as much as it seems to be tacked on just to please the sensibilities of certain audiences.

However, knowing Hollywood, don’t be surprised if the inevitable DVD of the film comes out with the obligatory “alternate ending” which should have been the one released into theaters in the first place.

Gerard Butler plays Clyde Shelton, an engineer whose wife and daughter are brutally murdered by two men who burst into their home one evening.

However, after the two men are caught and put on trial, Nick Rice, the prosecuting attorney played by Jamie Foxx, makes a deal with one of the killers and spares his life in exchange for the man’s testimony against his partner in order to improve Rice’s conviction rate, which is an astounding 96 percent.

Shelton is extremely disappointed that the second killer, Darby, is going to live, and he doesn’t feel any better when Rice tells him, “Some justice is better than no justice at all.”

Then it is 10 years later, the convicted killer is about to be executed, and we get a not-so-clever cross-cutting scene between the execution and a cello recital by Rice’s young daughter.

The execution doesn’t go as planned, it is definitely not painless, and the authorities figure out that Shelton was responsible.

Shelton makes clear that he is determined to kill everyone who was involved in the trial of the killers, and he gets revenge on Darby in more ways than one.

However, Shelton lets himself get caught, is tried and sent to prison, but the killings still continue even though Shelton is behind bars.

In fact, after a surprising turn of events in prison, Shelton is put into solitary confinement, and the killings still continue, each one more elaborate than the previous one.

Shelton plays with the authorities. They know that he did it, but he is locked up, and they can’t stop him.

However, the ending is a big letdown. Shelton is clearly an anti-hero in this story, but the ending makes you feel as if political correctness prevailed in spite of everything that goes before it.

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN is better than its disappointing ending.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”