With Law Abiding Citizenhitting cinemas next week, JOE GRIFFINtakes a look at the changing face of vigilantes in the movies, from gung-ho action men to more ambivalent anti-heroes
The opening moments of the forthcoming Law Abiding Citizenwill look familiar to modern audiences: a picture-perfect family is destroyed by violent home invaders, prompting the father of the brood to later take up arms and seek revenge. However, while this could be a description of any number of vigilante revenge movies , Law Abiding Citizenmakes a villain of the avenging angel, played by Gerard Butler. While director F Gary Gray's film is far from a smart treatise on right and wrong, it is interesting to see a mainstream movie frown upon those who take the law into their own hands.
Indeed, we've come a long way since man's-gotta-do westerns such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Initially, despite the melancholy of Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver(1976), vigilante films have often been appealingly simplistic revenge fantasies. Usually let down by the leniency of the criminal justice system, our hero must take the law into his (or her) own hands. Michael Winner's Death Wish(1974) set the template for a long-running franchise and a slew of copycat films.
Over the years, though, mainstream films became more ambivalent towards the subject. While Dirty Harry(1971) famously seemed to celebrate its hero's disdain for the killer's civil rights, its sequel, Magnum Force, saw Harry take down a group of fascist vigilante cops. Arguably even more significant was Falling Down(1993), Joel Schumacher's controversial tirade on modern life in which D-Fens (Michael Douglas) has a nervous breakdown and embarks on an odyssey of violence provoked by racial tension, beggars and petty fast food restaurant rules.
Falling Downarrived at an appropriate time: Nine years after Bernard Goetz infamously shot four black men who allegedly attempted to mug him on a New York subway, the American public's love affair with real-life vigilante group the Guardian Angels had died down.
In fact, in the past two decades audiences have shown little interest in the Death Wish-style revenge fantasies. Eye for an Eye(1996), starring Sally Field, flopped, as did the recent attempts to resurrect the genre, such as The Brave One, Paparazziand Death Sentence.
Over in arthouse cinemas, the journey from ordinary man to avenging angel has almost always been painted as a profoundly sad trip. None of the characters in Irreversible, Dead Man's Shoes, Little Childrenor Straw Dogsfound comfort in revenge. But it's more surprising that multiplex films seem to be following suit.
While action movies often climax in a jury-free execution (see Lethal Weapon 2, Bad Boys, True Liesand many more), Se7enplayed that moment as an operatic tragedy. Now even super- heroes, once the forces for good, are under moral scrutiny.
In The Dark Knight, Batman's loyal butler Alfred highlights the escalating nature of violence: "You crossed the line first, sir. You squeezed them. You hammered them to the point of desperation."
A number of theories abound regarding film-makers’ newfound ambiguity. Some believe that after 9/11 and the sobering aftermath of the war in Iraq, watching people fighting from outside the law isn’t as cathartic as it used to be.
Savage, a new Irish film that portrays a young man who seeks vengeance after a vicious assault, is intentionally murky in its morals. "I think, as modern society has progressed, people are a lot more aware of the two sides of every story," says director Brendan Muldowney. "I don't know whether it's from information or maturity. Film-makers are trying to be a bit more ambivalent, they're aware that it's not the Wild West any more."
Of course, it might be a cyclical trend, and the strange genre could be just lying dormant for now. While we may or may not be seeing a new dawn in responsible film-making, it is reassuringly unlikely that, for now, fascist vigilante films have laid down their arms.
Law Abiding Citizenopens next Friday
