17 Awesome Movie Concepts That Were Totally Botched

4. Law Abiding Citizen

The Pitch: After his wife and daughter are murdered in front of him and the killers escape justice, Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) takes the law into his own hands by meting out revenge on both the killers and anyone responsible for them slipping through the law's fingers.

What Happened?: Gerard Butler gives a deliciously entertaining performance in the lead role, but what could've been a giddily enjoyable B-movie goes wildly off the rails in act three, amping up the absurdity to unconscionable levels.

The movie's oft-complained about ending sees Shelton's adversary, slimy lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), outsmarting Shelton and killing him, sucking all the fun out of a righteously angry film which clearly should've seen Rice be served his just deserts.

It sadly casts a dark pall over the entire movie in retrospect, and though you can argue that Shelton also deserved to die for taking things too far, the fact that Rice gets off Scot-free, apparently due to Foxx insisting on on-the-fly rewrites, just left a sour taste.