Frank Darabont’s Law Abiding Citizen, his upcoming picture for the Film Department, just got another key cast member. Joining Gerard Butler (whose shingle, Evil Twins, is producing) will be Jamie Foxx as “a traumatized victim of the legal system.” The script was originally by Kurt Wimmer, who is still credited, but has seen some work by Darabont.
This is where it gets murky. Original project trade announcements pegged Butler as a prosecutor pitted against “a criminal mastermind who controls a city from the confines of his prison cell.” But THR’s current write-up spins the story differently: Butler is “a successful assistant D.A. who finds himself at the center of a vigilante plot hatched by a traumatized victim of the legal system,” the latter played by Foxx. Contrasting the previous announcements, Foxx sets off on a vengeful course of action against men who murdered his family and the legal types who helped one of the killers with a plea bargain.
Neither story quite clicks, but I like the Dr. Mabuse-like tendencies of the first logline. Time to track down current and former versions of this script to see what’s really happened with it.