10 Movie Messages Completely Undermined By Their Ending
6. The Criminal Justice System Needs Burning Down - Law Abiding Citizen
You won't find a movie ending more popularly infuriatingly than Law Abiding Citizen.
The film follows Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler), a man whose wife and daughter are murdered during a home invasion, and when the legal system refuses to grant him justice, he takes matters into his own brutal hands.
Shelton doesn't stop at killing those directly responsible, though: his wider scheme involves targeting those within America's criminal justice system, who he feels continue to enable and benefit from it.
At film's end he attempts to make an ultimate demonstration of this by blowing up City Hall with a bomb, but cynical lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx) turns the tables by moving the bomb into Shelton's own jail cell, resulting in his death.
It's a sour ending because most of the audience is firmly on Shelton's side despite his extreme, excessive methods.
Seeing the vigilante killed by a detestable instrument of the law, who goes outside the law to do so and then returns to lawyering within an unjust system, is bafflingly framed as a happy ending, despite most audiences seeing it as frustrating and tragic.