Australia's Replica Tumbler

Australia's "A Current Affair" aired a story last night about 2 Aussie blokes (Grant Hodgson and Gordon Hayes) who have custom built their own Batman Tumbler. And yes, you can actually drive it!

So FREAKIN COOL!

Watch the segment below:

http://video.au.msn.com/watch/video/australia-s-own-batmobile/xas9cg3

Law Abiding Citizen- That's no how you make revenge

The “revenge” genre is such a classic one. It is fair to say that films throughout the decades, from the quasi-exploitation Death Wishes of the 70’s and 80’s, to more recent big-star thrillers like The Brave One, have explored the genre to death.

What I loved about Law Abiding Citizen was, for the first half of the film at least, it looked like the revenge genre was going to go bigger and further than any of it's peers.

Where Death Wish pitted Charles Bronson against thugs and criminals in his local community and The Brave One's Jodie Foster opening up cans of the proverbial "whoop-ass" on the criminals of New York City, Law Abiding Citizen pits Gerard Butler's character (Clyde Shelton) up against the whole justice system. And let’s be honest, who hasn’t watched the news and seen weak sentences handed down to criminals and thought the justice system could do with a biblical break down and rebuild at some point?

And that’s what I found really appealing and captivating about Butler’s character. Like Bronson and Foster, Butler is introduced as your typical American family man, only to be tormented by a brutal home invasion that results in the death of his wife and daughter. The film wastes no time cutting right to the chase. Disatissified with the district attorney’s plea deal to reduce one killer’s sentence for testifying against the other, Shelton takes it upon himself 10 years later, to enact revenge on his family's murderer and all those involved in the morally questionable legal events following that crime, from the lawyer's to the judges and everybody in between.

It’s when Law Abiding Citizen raises the stakes in this matter that I really got into the film.

I love a good revenge film and Butler’s transformation from simple family man, to avenger is believable and relatabale. It's not difficult to see the justice system fails him and you really do want to see him get revenge as a result. We understand his violent torture methods are a reflection of his hatred towards the sleezy and downright evil man who murdered his family. I for one couldn’t stop smiling and giggling with satisfaction as Butler went about his delightful and gory torture.

High class cinema Law Abiding Citizen is not. Bloody, graphic and violent revenge cinema this definitely is. But like any genre film, there is a roadmap that really should be followed. For the revenge film, it goes something like this:

(a) introduce average Joe-Citizen;

(b) kill off Joe’s loved one;

(c) show “the system” failing to deliver adequate justice;

(d) minus a mask and cape, Joe goes all vigilante and decides to clean up the town;

(e) Joe gets his own justice in bloody, satisifactory style;

(f) audience cheers, curtains.

Law Abiding Citizen follows this map perfectly for 2/3 of its duration. However there is a certain point in the film that the story takes a detour, undermining everything its built up so far and ultimately deviates too far from this roadmap.

To put it simply, you don’t turn the good guy, into the bad guy. You don’t spend an hour or so of what is obviously a revenge film, building up a character who you can relate to (and are obviously meant to relate to being a “typical law abiding citizen”), who you empathise with, who you’re cheering for the whole time, only to kill him off and ultimately fail in his revenge. You want to see him win, you don’t want the bad guys (in this case the “system”) to win!

It’s almost like this film is travelling along nicely for a while and then it suddenly discovers some kind of moral compass, that questions itself and perhaps the audiences belief that we don’t want to see some blood thirsty psychopath killing a whole bunch of people in his family’s name.

But that’s just it, in a revenge film, we DO want to see him achieve his goals! How goddamn cool and un-Hollywood would it have been if this film had ended with Butler’s character, succeeding in his plot to kill the heads of the justice system?! What if the closing shot was one of him walking free from jail, hinting a possible sequel where Shelton is on the run from the authorities, living outside the law and delivering his own kind of justice. A whole new franchise could have been spawned! The new millennium's version of the Death Wish series! No-one would have expected it!

But no, instead we get some, “see the system works”, morally righteous, bullshit ending. That's not how you end a revenge film.

And you know, I get it, the film makers were trying to show that while Butler’s character’s intentions for vengeance where warranted, he ultimately crosses a line. But it’s the crossing of these morally questionable lines that make a revenge film so cool. These characters of the genre exist to enact the kind of justice that some people would only fantasize about.

And isn’t fantasy what we want from a film?