More movie/TV crap as opposed to 'proper' blogging... Because, watching Law Abiding Citizen last night, I found my expectations (based on the trailer) thoroughly confounded. Here's the setup: Family falls victim to home invasion, father forced to watch as bad guys torture and kill his wife and daughter. Somehow, the evidence is shakey (all DNA evidence was magically inadmissable) so the prosecutor makes a deal with the most vicious of the villains to get the other one - who barely did anything - sent to Death Row. Former family man is Not Happy. Takes ten years to plot a very elaborate revenge. Starts killing everyone involved in the case. Turns out, he's a Q-analogue - that is to say, he builds deadly gadgets for the Government and Military, so undesirable, hard-to-get-at targets can be eliminated cleanly. Hijinks ensue.
Now, given that the 'perpetrator' in this film was himself a victim - not just of a home invasion, but of a very lazy prosecutor and a very obvious miscarriage of justice - I was surprised that he was actually treated as the villain for most of the movie. If anyone had a case for gaining the sympathy of the audience, it was him.
All the while, I was expecting it to turn out that he was playing a game designed to let the Prosecutor discover The Truth - for example, that the home invasion was part of a Government/Military plot to keep the tinkerer in check, and that the killings of anyone involved in that 10-year-old case was part of a greater cover-up. Eventually, it would almost certainly transpire that he was being framed all along... and that the Prosecutor was being used by some shady puppet-master.
And yet we, the audience, were meant to side with the Prosecutor who thought more of his conviction record than his client's need to see proper justice done. We're meant to be horrified when people connected to the case are killed by the myriad complex devices the killer has created, because it's part of some insanely twisted revenge trip...
Maybe I missed something important in the plot or the dialogue, but I think it's strange - not to say exceptionally brave - for Hollywood to portray the victim as the villain on such a grand scale. His family are viciously abused and killed, the so-called Justice System fails him because of a risk-averse Prosecutor, so he takes matters into his own hands. In most other movies, he'd be the hero.
I have to say, I was impressed by all the gadgetry - the single-shot cellphone gun was a genuine shock and left me stunned for a good few minutes - but as the intricacy of the gadgets increased, the tinkerer's insanity became more apparent. His revenge had gone beyond justice and become a jihad, in the worst possible sense.
Painting a victim in that way basically wrecked the movie for me. He had been betrayed, so his vengence was - in Hollywood's usual terms - entirely justified. Sure, it might have been getting rather excessive - I'd have settled for offing the home invasion killer and the Prosecutor (or, for poetic justice, his family), but the Prosecutor was set up as the hero of the piece, despite having so comprehensively failed his past client. Blowing up the paralegals was over the top, and trying to destroy City Hall was just taking the piss, but my confusion over who should have been the protagonist was what really messed up the movie. It could have been making a statement about the abuse and ruin of the US legal system, but it dallied too much with Saw's mechanical trickery, and the gratuitous horror of the so-called 'torture porn' genre (though either it didn't actually show as much as those movies generally would, or it was substantially edited for TV). I thought the clever legal tomfoolery used by the 'victim' was designed to prove that he wasn't actually involved... Turned out it was for his own convenience.
On a vaguely similar note, last night's Being Human was the first real disappointment of series 4, if only because it seemed to recycle old material (Annie's alleged 'blandness', and the suggestion that people find her irritating which, if I remember correctly, was first posited by her murderous former boyfriend). Sadly, it didn't end there... It utilised that dull old device of the new arrival playing divide and conquer, and used Annie's 'special powers' as deus ex machina. It's more than a little frustrating that Annie's poltergeist tendencies are so often touched upon, but are yet to be explored in any depth.
Playing on the character's old insecurities and 'zapping' the villain with her 'magic' is bad enough - not to mention a complete waste of Lenora Critchlow - but coupled with a situation where a new arrival is somehow more trustworthy than existing friends (however tenuous and new the friendship) just seems lazy. It's not just that it's retreading ground that was covered with Mitchell and George, but that it's suggesting no-one has learned anything from their experiences together. The one almost believable moment was Annie telling Hal that she didn't want to know about his past, but even that was muddied somewhat by her assertions in the last couple of series that Mitchell's past wasn't important, only for her to be horrified when his past caught up with him, and he turned out to be every bit the monster he'd warned her he was. To have gone through that, and then deny Hal the opportunity to be open was foolish, and - going by the end of the episode - is signposting upcoming events.
As a minor note, I find it unfathomable that someone as houseproud and family-focussed as Annie would not know Tom's birthday, which was another linchpin for the fractures that occurred in this episode.
In fact, versus their behaviour in previous episodes, all three of them behaved like children, and without the common sense that they've displayed in the past... And, sadly, the Scooby Doo reference made by the villain of the piece was all too accurate.
The other thing that bugged me - and has bugged me since it first turned up, casually, in the first episode of this series - is the idea of werewolf blood being toxic to vampires. Pretty sure that hasn't been even mentioned in any of the preceding three series... and the vampires have never before shied away from shedding the blood of werewolves without the use of protective gear, so it came across like an obvious plot device. Now the purpose of that device has been revealed, it seems all too convenient.
That said, I have confidence in Mr Whithouse... I'm still not certain of the apparent direction of this series, but I hope it can return to form next week... when another old friend shows up.
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