After Clyde Shelton’s [Gerard Butler] wife and child are both murdered the prosecuting lawyer, Nick Rice [Jamie Foxx], decides to cut a deal with one of the two murderers so as to get a reduced sentence and send the other on death row.  Clyde is not satisfied with this course of action and decides to take revenge on not only the pair of criminals who murdered his family but also the entire justice system that failed him.

Here comes a huge surprise as I found myself loving this movie.  We all know revenge films are really easily plotted and always seem to turn out well and here is no different.  The movie is filled with crazy plots points that if you think about too much may make your brain explode but if you decide to run with it you will find yourself having a ton of fun with it.  The film plays itself as a big budget movie that is really a B movie where Clyde takes the moral high ground and does the equivalent of a lot of very poignant letters to the editor would, except with guns and bombs and crap.

As you can expect from a B movie the acting and story take a passenger seat to some awesome looking kill scenes that not only blow your mind because of how out there they are but because you have to wonder how he does this from a maximum security prison cell.  I couldn’t help but be reminded of David Fincher’s The Game which did a lot of the same things, very well thought out plans that may have hinged on a lot of ifs but of course due to a lot of inside knowledge on the targets were well executed and covered all bases.  After the first couple crazy kills I had nothing to do but imagine that everything that happened did so exactly as Clyde imagined it would and Nick and all the other characters were playing into his plan by trying their darndest not to, or whatever they were doing anyways.

I think my biggest complaint walking out of the theatre was that a lot of the kills were given away in the trailer.  I know, it’s becoming really easy to complain about trailers spoiling movies, but I found it a really huge thing in the movie.  I had the trailer fresh in my mind, since it was playing in front of movies the previous week that I had seen at the cinema, and most of the kills were so easy to see because as soon as a setting was shown to me I remembered seeing that a car explodes and so I knew it was coming and that disappointed me.  I know people are all saying that trailers need to be cut better so to keep the viewer surprised when they see the movie and I tend to agree but still enjoy enjoyable movies with or without giveaway trailers.  So my advice is to skip the trailer and just watch the movie and enjoy the shit out of it.

So in the end here is a great B movie that you can definitely sink your teeth into and hopefully enjoy how it decides to blow your mind like how any great film of this type can satisfy.  Go for the fun actiony moments and leave knowing that you saw something awesome.

IMDB says 7.6/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 22%

I say 8.0/10