THE PRISONER Foxx tries to fathom Butler’s game.

Death Wish meets Cape Fear meets Seven meets Saw, Law Abiding Citizen is the looniest bad movie of the season—ludicrous from scene to scene yet so thoroughly committed to topping its own crazy ideas that it inspires a kind of awe. Even summarizing the plot means risking a concussion by forehead slap: Foxx stars as an ambitious assistant DA who, unable to prove that two obviously guilty murderers committed a double homicide, helps fashion a deal that sends at least one of the perpetrators to death row. Not good enough, says Butler, who wants revenge for his wife and daughter. To reveal no more than the trailer does, his character turns out to be an engineer who specializes in killing people remotely in mind-bogglingly elaborate ways. After plotting for ten years, he sets out to teach his former lawyer a lesson in reasonable doubt. Meanwhile, the gore contingent gets sated with gruesome deaths involving fish toxins, home-tool-kit-abetted castration, suffocation timers and a use of a cell phone that will have viewers pining for the nuked fridge in Indy 4.

“I think he’s saving you for last,” one cop tells the embattled attorney, after more than half a dozen people involved with the case have been killed. Really? Whatever gave you that idea? This insane, reactionary swill surely had the actors cackling on set.

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