Most people saw the previews for Law Abiding Citizen and rightly stayed away. I of course sat through it. As a struggling screenwriter I see a lot of bad movies to see where they go wrong. This one however went wrong for a reason I wasn’t expecting. The story and movie fail because the villain couldn’t clearly and concisely state their reasoning. At one point Jamie Foxx’s character asks the villain point blank why he’s killing innocent people and all the villain can come up with is “They’ll get the message.” If you know anything about creating movies, they’re all about questions. Will he get the girl? Will Superman prevail? In this movie we want to know if Jamie Foxx’s character will stop the villain but also why the villain is killing? It’s in the back of your mind the whole time because the movie keeps bringing it up but never answers it. Since the movie nor the villain himself can adequately answer the question the movie fails.
But how did the movie makers get themselves into such a predicament?
- Convinced themselves that providing an answer was unnecessary
- Made poor choices when designing the story
Convinced themselves that providing an answer was unecesary
The old adage is still true:
If you can’t put it into words, you don’t understand it.
For screenwriters that translates to – if you can’t put it into a log line or elevator pitch that excites people to see your movie, you don’t have a movie worth making. A novice and struggling screenwriter myself I of course tried to ignore this – “I know the log line isn’t that exciting but once you read the whole thing you’ll see it’s magic.” If anyone was nice enough to actually read one of my scripts it always came back with the same comment – it sucked. It’s a novice mistake to believe other things can get you by the old adage.
The makers of Law Abiding Citizen may not be as novice but they’re still guilty of the same offense. Maybe they thought other parts of the story would make up for it, or the actors could pull it out, or like I suspect – just hoped somehow in the end it would magically work. They were right about one thing; whatever they did allowed them to get studio approval to make the movie despite its glaring hole. A hole I suspect was present in the log line and pitch, though they still greenlit the movie.
Made poor choices when designing the story
Of course your villains don’t always have to explain their motivation or even be rational, they can simply be evil. But that isn’t the story Law Abiding Citizen wanted to tell, it wasn’t simply a story about escape from or stopping an evil villain. It was a story about how a law abiding and sympathetic character turns into a villain, then the escape part. The first scenes show how he’s the perfect family man – a loving father and husband. His family is then murdered in front of his eyes and next we see him arguing with the lead prosecutor not to cut a deal with one of the killers. Jump ten years and that same sympathetic character is now killing innocent people in the justice system. The movie never establishes that the justice system was particularly corrupt, just not perfect. So what we see as the audience is a sympathetic character turn into a monster killing innocent people. It’s hard to swallow. Basically you can’t have it both ways. Either he’s evil and must be stopped or he’s killing in the name of something. In this movie they try to make the switch and all with no rhyme or reason when the villain can’t even explain himself.
One of the most famous MacGuffins
This is a story problem. One that you face in telling almost any story. There are of course tricks and ways to fix story problems. If there isn’t enough tension add a ticking clock.
Add a ticking clock time pressure to the main plot goal and a little ticking clock to each scene if possible – bomb about to go off, meeting, deadline, race, running out of something important.
Probably the most famous of these tricks is the MacGuffin. You may not know what it is or why people need it, you just know that they have to have it.
What the makers of Law Abiding Citizen did was equivalent to putting in a MacGuffin, only to turn around and require the story to tell us all about it. Making him sympathetic painted themselves into a corner. They had to explain the killings and as we can see, they never did come up with an adequate solution.
I wish it was more magical
This is also the type of story problem Pixar runs into but solves using a creative team and they do it better than almost anyone in Hollywood. They understand story and aren’t willing to try and skirt the problems, they hit them head on. When I started writing screenplays I found myself hoping for that magic more than ever. In fact my education in screenwriting could be summed up as constant beatings at the hands of readers to make me realize that there is no magic. Screenwriting is more problem solving than magic. Your first lesson – if you can’t put it into words you don’t understand it.
But we all believe in magic don’t we? This quote from Adam Rodnitzky about startups seems only fitting when you switch “technology” for “magic”.
It’s important to get customer validation early on. You can have the greatest technology, or website, or service, or whatever, but it’s ultimately meaningless if you haven’t verified that there are actually customers willing to spend money on or around what you do.
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