Revenge, as a much-quoted Italian proverb goes, and as some of us know from experience, is a dish best served cold. In "Law Abiding Citizen," the protagonist consumes a very cold dish indeed, spending a full 10 years preparing a complicated scheme of assaults upon the criminal justice system and some important individuals within it to satisfy a voracious appetite for vengeance. Its theme of vigilante justice recalls the "Death Wish" series, its virtually unstoppable attacker resembles the Rambo of "First Blood," and one juicy sequence owes something to the currently fashionable torture porn of the "Saw" and "Hostel" flicks.

The movie exceeds the scale and intensity of its predecessors, however, through the ingenuity of its avenger and the motivation for his attacks. It opens with couple of brutal thugs invading the home of Clyde Shelton (Gerard Butler), killing his wife and young daughter; when an ambitious district attorney, Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), concerned for his conviction rate, negotiates a deal with one of the criminals, trading a lighter sentence for the sure execution of his partner, Shelton reacts with shock and outrage.

His anger leads Shelton to an ingenious and bloody course of action against the people and the system that betrayed him. He somehow corrupts the process of a supposedly painless lethal injection so that one of the thugs suffers horribly at his execution, screaming and convulsing in agony. The prisoner's partner, the more brutal and culpable of the pair, experiences something even more special - Shelton paralyzes him with a special toxin so that he remains helpless but fully awake while undergoing a gradual dismemberment by scalpel, tin snips, chain saw, and box cutter.

When the police arrest him, Shelton cheerfully accepts prison and begins to manipulate the district attorney and the system, trading a confession for some outrageous privileges while working out schemes to punish all the people complicit in the murderer's escaping justice. From his prison cell he manages to assassinate the judge who accepted the prosecutor's initial deal and the attorney who defended the murderer. He caps it all off by exploding the cars of a half a dozen of Nick Rice's colleagues, killing them all, and ultimately, as the mayor says, terrorizing the whole city of Philadelphia.

Beyond protecting all the remaining people involved in the plea bargain from the series of murders by remote control, Rice needs to solve the puzzle of the man's remarkable methods. He learns that Shelton, an engineer and an inventor, worked for the Defense Department as a specialist in arranging assassinations of political figures, and finally, along with the chief detective in the case (Colm Meaney), discovers the secrets of his success, an elaborate operation that he planned and constructed over the 10 years since the initial crime.

The constant rhythm of violence and the mystery of the engineer's design occupy the center of "Law Abiding Citizen," but the real background and motivation for his conduct, as he attempts to explain to the district attorney, grows out of the process of justice itself. When he initially convinces a judge of the proper basis for granting his plea for bail, for example, he attacks her and refuses the bail because he believes violent criminals - he's charged with murder after all - shouldn't be allowed to walk the streets. A man on a mission, he simply wants to destroy the whole system that so cruelly denied him even the scant satisfaction of a proper punishment of the men who killed his family.

The picture succeeds in showing the remarkable creativity and shocking violence of its protagonist's plans, and certainly wins some sympathy for his reasoning. But it also shows the horrible consequences of his actions, when a number of positive characters die because of their professional involvement in his case. The one lawyer on Nick Rice's staff who expresses some qualms about the moral ambiguity of her boss's ambitious wheeling and dealing dies in one of Shelton's brilliantly orchestrated explosions, as if her life meant no more than the murderer he tortured. In "Law Abiding Citizen" everyone seems guilty, and the cold dish of revenge finally becomes a bloody banquet that satisfies no one.