Law-abiding citizen review

 Number 937 on the top 1000 films of all time is the action-thriller 'Law Abiding Citizen.'

Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is a family-man and former CIA operative. He witnesses his wife and daughter being murdered in a home-invasion by Clarence Derby (Christian Stolte.) When the justice system, including his lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) lets him down by cutting a deal with Derby ensuring his premature release, Clyde Shelton begins to take the law into his own hands.

Vigilante justice always makes for a good film. People fall through the justice system all the time either through corruption or incompetence. Men like Shelton are always sympathetic protagonists, not to mention their poor wives and daughters. They've been victims of horrific crimes. Their entire families have been killed. Nobody's going to miss their murderers. However, what makes vigilante thrillers so interesting is their quiet, intimate nature. Generally it's one man acting out of passion or retaliation with one gun or one knife. Maybe he does have a plan, but the plan isn't as elaborate as Law-Abiding Citizen.

And that's where this film falls down. It all becomes so ridiculous. I get that Shelton is some super-soldier, CIA operative, but are we supposed to believe that he's spent ten years digging into every solitary confinement cell in prison? That he's turned mobile phones into bombs? Or created a remote-operated machine-gun mount? I get him tracking down Derby and brutally torturing and killing him, but everything else is so ridiculous.

It also gave the film an overly, dark tone which made for an uncomfortable watch. Gerard Butler and Jamie Foxx did the best with what they had, but neither character had any real depth to them. Rice is your typical man too busy to spend any time with his family while Shelton is a seemingly innocuous man with a psychopath bubbling beneath the surface.

This film is based on a good premise. Shame the execution was way too over-the-top.

Fantastic Mr Fox review

 Number 496 on the top 1000 films of all time is Wes Anderson's animated comedy Fantastic Mr Fox.

Based on Roald Dahl's 1970 story, Fantastic Mr Fox follows Foxy Fox (George Clooney) who regularly thieves from three farmers: Boggis (Robin Hurlstone,) Bunce (Hugo Guiness) and Bean (Michael Gambon.) These farmers swear revenge on Foxy Fox endangering him, his wife Felicity (Meryl Streep) and his family and friends.

This was a stop-motion film and the animation was absolutely gorgeous. I loved the rich Autumnal colour schemes. The colour truly popped. All the different animals looked adorable too from Foxy Fox to his badger lawyer voiced by Bill Murray to the villainous rat voiced by Willem Defoe.

However, this star-studded cast and lovely animation wasn't enough to stop this ultimately being a film made for kids. I was hoping that it would be a family friendly film that would appeal to children and parents alike a la Monsters Inc or Toy Story, but this really was meant for little children. And that did hurt its watchability factor. Maybe I'm just a grumpy old man, but maybe it was seemingly obvious that this film was always meant for kids. Children would love the bright colour scheme and the adorable animal characters.

Nevertheless, the conflicts were very juvenile such as the subplot of Mr Fox's son Ash Fox and his rivalry with his cousin Kristofferson. Ash feels threatened and jealous of his seemingly perfect cousin. This is a subplot that would be obviously appealing to little kids but not grumpy, old curmudgeons like me. All the violence bordered on cartoonish, like Mr Fox and his oppossum sidekick climbing up an electric fence. With every climb, the electric shocks x-ray their entire bodies. 

And a lot of the dialogue was contrived. It didn't seem natural and I think that some of that was down to George Clooney himself. I noticed that in a lot of conversations Mr Fox had with his son there were these strange hesitations at the end of each line. You could argue that, at first, this signifies their strained relationship. But their relationship fixes throughout the film, so why are there still the strange hesitations?

I think if I was twenty years younger I would have loved this film, but, now,  I'm far too much of a grumpy old man. It was good as far as it went, but that wasn't very far at all.