LAW ABIDING CITIZEN (18).

Thriller/Action. Gerard Butler, Jamie Foxx, Bruce McGill, Leslie Bibb, Viola Davis, Regina Hall, Emerald-Angel Young, Brooke Mills, Ksenia Hulayev. Director: F Gary Gray.

Justice is blind – and by the end of F Gary Gray’s gruesome thriller, it’s also horribly burned, dismembered and disembowelled as a family man turns the tables on the lawmakers who let him down.

The moral conundrum that underpins Kurt Wimmer’s screenplay is constantly obscured by graphic violence and relentlessly sadistic revenge fantasies played out by the central character on the denizens of Philadelphia.

His corruption at the hands of an unfair justice system and subsequent quest for retribution are supposed to blur the lines between good and evil, but the protagonists aren’t sketched in sufficient detail to carry the story’s flimsy convictions.

Gerard Butler chews lifelessly on every cliched line, while Jamie Foxx, as the crusading man of the law who must stop him, is just plain lifeless.

In a deeply unpleasant prologue, brilliant inventor Clyde Shelton (Butler) is at home, playing the doting father to his young daughter (Hulayev), when two thugs break in, stab and restrain him and his wife (Mills) and go after the girl.

Clyde loses the two people he cares most about in this sorry world then, to add insult to unbearable injury, glory-chasing lead prosecutor Nick Rice (Foxx) cuts a deal with one of the perpetrators, agreeing a reduced sentence in exchange for testimony against the accomplice.

“Some justice is better than no justice at all,” he contends, caring not a jot about Clyde's suffering.

Ten years after the worst moment in his life, Clyde enacts his masterplan to make Nick suffer just like he did, by attacking his colleagues Jonas Cantrell (McGill) and Sarah Lowell (Bibb) and the mayor (Davis).

Clyde even involves Nick’s wife Kelly (Hall) and daughter Denise (Young), so the prosecutor tries to reason with him.

Law Abiding Citizen plays out largely as expected, with lashings of blood and gore to remind us that Clyde is a psychopath who will gut his cellmate to pass the time.

The hunt for the accomplice is a classic Scooby-Doo caper, replete with a ridiculous pay-off that is impossible to take seriously.

Scenes between Butler and Foxx lack tension as both actors go through the motions.

Justice is bland.