Revenge is a dish best served cold by a very angry, naked Gerard Butler.

Yes, LAW ABIDING CITIZEN is a revenge fantasy, but do we really want to see the real life-stealing, agonizing paperwork of prosecutors and police officers? Do we really need to see Gerard Butler’s character digging a hole for 10 years?

Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler) is a mild-mannered family man with a young daughter and a beautiful wife. A home invasion ends with Clyde wounded and his wife and daughter murdered. The sadistic thugs are caught but the assistant D.A., Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), intent on maintaining his stellar conviction record, makes a sweet deal with one of the killers for a few years in prison. The other one gets the death sentence. Clyde is not happy.

Every time I watch a 48 Hours Mystery and I see husbands who kill their wives and spend the next 10 years happily with a new family, I wonder: “Where were the parents of the wife? Why didn’t the woman’s father or grandmother kill the bastard? Do eighty-year olds really do hard time? Do senior citizens become “pillow biters” (male) or “butched in” (female) convicts?

Jamie Foxx understands. Foxx told Parade magazine: “If it had been my daughter who was barely a teenager – my daughter is 15 – Roman Polanski would be missing…”.

Clyde has the means and intelligence to seek revenge. His plan takes 10 years to implement. In fact, his mission is to kill everyone involved with the case.

A genius and self-made millionaire, Clyde has done his homework and invested a great deal of money in killing off every official and office clerk that pushed through the plea deal. But Rice was the true architect of the arrangement.

When the death row inmate is finally put to death in a horrific manner, there is only one suspect. Clyde plays a cat-and-mouse game confusing Rice and the entire law enforcement community right up to the mayor.

Put in prison, Clyde continues a killing rampage. Clyde’s revenge has causalities and he doesn’t care if file clerks are killed. Not one secretary bolts. Rice finds out that Clyde isn’t your average maniac but a highly-trained master Kung Fu killer trained by the U.S. government. Clyde is a one-person army with a hi-tech factory and unlimited funds.

Your loyalties are clearly with Clyde until bystanders are killed and he tells Nick he is going to kill everyone.

Nick has a crisis of conscience, nicely expressed by Foxx. He did make the deal with the killer who breezed by with just a few years in prison for two savage murders.

Butler, who serves as an Executive Producer (which means he wasn’t forced into doing a 300 nude scene*), ditches his accent and is an effective villain we agree with. His scenes with Foxx are those standard pas-de-deux between two male stars we expect and demand.

Yes, Clyde doesn’t kill with finesse but with SAW cruelty. It brings an initial shock to the audience but is highly effective in adding a thrill to the movie.

*When asked if the naked picture is really him, Jamie Foxx admitted the Tonight Show that “it is me”. Conan O’Brien then congratulated the star and shook his hand. Foxx had a really good explanation I don’t believe, but here it is: Foxx said the full frontal photograph was shot by himself when he was shooting the Miami Vice movie. He sent it to his make-up artist for a before-and-after comparison of his physical training for a nude scene. Foxx told Conan it has impressed the ladies and increased his gay fan base.

Victoria Alexander lives in Las Vegas, Nevada and answers every email. You can contact Victoria directly at masauu@aol.com.

QUOTE: Painful to sit through. Except for Travolta & Thurman’s dance, this is awful. Product placement everywhere and only Aerosmith’s Joe Perry & The Rock keep their dignity.

If you ever have questioned the importance of the director, see BE COOL. It is a lesson in playbook. The undeniable magnetism of a thinner John Travolta is arguably here, but he and his co-star from PULP FICTION, Uma Thurman, desperately suffer from not having the guidance of Quentin Tarantino.

The direction, the editing, the tempo are all wrong. The story is messy and uninteresting. The characters are cartoons.

The genius of what Tarantino did with Travolta and Thurman looms over BE COOL. I kept thinking: “Gosh, Thurman was so good in KILL BILL 1 & 2. What happened?” Here, they are amateurs with Thurman over-acting as a sweet, but dim-lit, indie music exec. While Travolta “keeps his Chili Palmer cool,” all the other characters, except The Rock and Andre Benjamin (as cousin Dabu), make fools of themselves. If you must play an outrageous character, the key is to play the role with sincerity. In BE COOL, the director, F. Gary Gray, situates all the players as little one-person movies. There is no connection between any of the characters. Everyone is in their own movie announcing their dialogue. No one connects though they effectively do commercials for products.

Chili Palmer (Travolta) wants out of his successful movie career. While he is a certified success, everyone still reminds him he is a former loanshark. When an associate, Tommy Athens (James Woods) gets murdered by the Russian Mob, Palmer adopts his budding R&B singer Linda Moon (Christina Milian) and his widow Edie (Thurman). To manager Moon, Palmer waltzes into music mogul Nick (Harvey Keitel) Carr’s office and simply demands her contract. Seems Palmer does not like the way Carr’s junior associate Raji (Vince Vaughn) talks to her. Meanwhile, Edie is in debt to a rival producer, Sin LaSalle (Cedric the Entertainer). Now, way back in the 70s Edie did Aerosmith’s laundry and Steven Tyler still remembers the smell of lilac in his underpants. Though Tyler obviously hasn’t kept up with her record label business. Tyler, who somehow turned up in THE POLAR EXPRESS, is getting a lot of cameo work right now. Who is his brilliant Hollywood agent and does he also handle Fergie from THE BLACK EYED PEAS?

The screenplay by Peter Steinfeld has some nicely worded lines, delivered with ease and style by Travolta. But it is the director who should take the blame for blowing the sexy, snarly charm of GET SHORTY.

There has been a lot of publicity about the breakout role of The Rock as Raji’s gay bodyguard, Elliot Wilhelm. This is because The Rock not only embraces his role, he appears to be enjoying himself and involved with his character. Everyone else is mugging for the camera.

A friend of mine has read the book by Elmore Leonard this movie is based on. While she said the book was fabulous, she also admitted the movie was a huge disappointment. After seeing BE COOL, no one could get me to read the book unless it included the address for THE ARK OF THE COVENANT.

Though, I must say, with a film so laden with product placement, I was sure I would see Travolta with the Pepsi logo stamped on his forehead. See the movie and count the products!

New Line Cinema
A Vincent Newman & Tucker Tooley and Joseph Nittolo Entertainment production
Running time –110 minutes / MPAA rating: R

This is a Vin Diesel movie that ignores him. Diesel was hailed as an unlikely phenomenon. He’s not movie star appropriate, yet under the guidance of Rob Cohen who directed him in THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and XXX, he became last year’s Big, Big Thing (2003 is rightfully going to be the year of Colin Farrell).

Diesel is Cohen’s alter ego. He’s actually Cohen’s stand-in. Cohen made him a sex symbol. Cohen loves Diesel because he’s really playing the fantasized Rob Cohen. F. Gary Gray, who directed A MAN APART, does not have the same feelings for Diesel. Not only doesn’t Gray play to Diesel’s strengths, he treats him as a supporting player. There are no flattering angles of Diesel; he’s practically sidelined. Perhaps Gray isn’t all to blame. Let’s also blame one of the producers: Vin Diesel. He’s held responsible for not understanding his audience appeal. He should have hired a director who wanted to, if not mythologize him, at least make him look good. The screenplay was not fashioned as a star vehicle.

Actually filmed between THE FAST AND THE FURIOUS and XXX, A MAN APART is a muddled story about a rogue L.A. DEA team. Sean Vetter (Diesel) and his little partner Demetrius Hicks (Larenz Tate) take down Memo Lucero (Geno Silva) a drug kingpin in Mexico and return him to the U.S. to live in prison. Another ruthless kingpin, Diablo, takes his place. Diablo attempts to assassinate Sean at his beachfront Malibu house, but only his wife Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors) is killed. Vetter, according to the formula, is out for bloody revenge. We can tell he means business because he wears a goatee. In wrecking havoc, Vetter breaks a lot of laws and kills people. Luckily, Timothy Olyphant (he will survive DREAMCATCHER) turns up as an arrogant, reed-thin, Porsche-driving drug dealer. He treats Vetter like a traffic cop.

Yes, A MAN APART has the requisite wild killing in the streets (where all the killers are female!) that we have come to believe undercover DEA agents engage in daily. But the story moves along at a slow pace. Nothing fresh happens. It seems to end several times. If audiences are primed for a Vin Diesel movie, they will be disappointed. As Steve Greer, of Greer Communications, succinctly whispered to me at the end of the screening, “It’s a Steve Seagal movie with Seagal.”

Cast:
Sean Vetter: Vin Diesel
Demetrius Hicks: Larenz Tate
Jack Slayton: Timothy Olyphant
Stacy Vetter: Jacqueline Obradors
Memo Lucero: Geno Silva
Mateo Santos: Juan Fernandez
Ty Frost: Steve Eastin
Big Sexy: George Sharperson

Credits:
Director: F Gary Gray
Screenwriters: Christian Gudegast, Paul Scheuring
Producers: Tucker Tooley, Vincent Newman, Joseph Nittolo, Vin Diesel
Executive producers: Michael De Luca, Claire Rudnick Polstein, F Gary Gray
Director of photography: Jack N. Green
Production designer: Ida Random
Music: Anne Dudley
Co-producer: George Zakk
Costume designer: Shawn Barton
Editors: Bob Brown, William Hoy