Dave Elliot
Anthony Hopkins, were he dead, would be spinning in his grave. Since Hannibal Lecter nibbled his way onto 
screens nearly two decades ago, cinematic serial killers have really let the homicidal side down. Insanity has become a depressingly, well, sanitized game of what-limb-shall-we-take-off-first (here’s looking at you, Jigsaw, you twat).
Now it’s scary Scot Gerard Butler’s turn to step up to the plate, though nobody seems to have thought that an actor still getting offered lead roles off the back of slo-mo splatterfest 300 might be a bit of a dodgy choice. Regardless…
Butler plays Clyde Shelton, engineer extraordinaire, whose wife and daughter are raped and killed during a rather horrifying home invasion. Despite Shelton’s appeals to hotshot lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) to press the case in court, principal perp Clarence Derby (Christian Stolte) manages to exchange a confession for a criminally light sentence.
Ten years pass without incident; that is until Shelton, driven mad with grief at his loss and the failure of the justice system to do its job, begins to target those he held responsible, in increasingly gruesome and ingenious ways.
The film is tightly plotted and the script (for the most part) manages to keep up with it. Unfortunately, tight doesn’t mean especially original, and the bastard love child of Silence of the Lambs and Prison Break was always going to be an ugly baby.
Gerard does the job well enough, even if his Glaswegian accent consistently pokes its head up like a Highland prairie dog; but it’s hard to shake the feeling that, despite all the accolades, Jamie Foxx really is a bit of a wank actor. He does a fantastic line in grimaces, which erupt all over his face at regular intervals, but aside from that is completely unconvincing as Rice. Thank God then that the film possesses enough zip to speed over its many large, character-shaped holes, to deposit you safely on the other side, reasonably entertained, slightly more skint and utterly unimproved.