YMMV / Law Abiding Citizen

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The exploding mobile phone Clyde uses to kill the judge? In Real Life, Shin-Bet used one to kill a senior member of Hamas, as documented in The Gatekeepers.
  • A couple of years after the assassination, Deadliest Warrior successfully recreated it.
• Angst? What Angst?: Nick witnesses quite a few extremely gruesome deaths. Many of which would leave anyone else with PTSD. Yet he never once shows any sign of mental trauma even after his coworkers are blown up via car bombs.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: Many viewers believe the film should not have ended with Clyde getting blown up with his own bomb or with Nick facing zero consequences for his actions throughout the movie.
• Complete Monster: Clarence Darby stands in stark contrast to the relatively sympathetic Clyde Shelton. Darby instigates Clyde's Roaring Rampage of Revenge when he and his accomplice, Rupert Ames, rob his home. Darby rapes and kills Clyde's wife before doing the same to their daughter, all while Ames yells at him to stop. In court, Darby lies and says Ames did it, resulting in Ames being sentenced to death while Darby get a slap on the wrist. When Clyde sabotages Ames's execution so he dies a slow and painful death and frames Darby for it, Darby chuckles when he hears about Ames's painful death on the news, and shoots at the police when they try to arrest him. He's about to murder an officer for no reason before it turns out to be Clyde in disguise, who tortures and kills Darby.
• Critical Dissonance: A pretty significant one. Rotten Tomatoes lists that 26% of critics liked it (with an average rating of 4.3/10), while 75% of audience liked it. Many critics found the violence in the movie excessive and tasteless, and the story nonsensical.
• Designated Hero: Nick. He lets the wrong person off the hook with a plea bargain while condemning a relatively innocent accomplice to death row just to aid his career to become district attorney, inadvertently making a murderer of the man whose family was killed by said person, and suffers no significant blowback by movie's end.
• Draco in Leather Pants: A popular take is presenting Clyde as a hero fighting a corrupt system, ignoring that many of the people who die at Clyde's hands were simply employees doing their jobs and not actively trying to wrong him. That and he killed his cellmate simply to advance his plot, cared very little for collateral damage (shooting a funeral and trying to city hall) on top of sending a snuff film to Nick's daughter. Clyde might be sympathetic, but the crimes he committed are still wrong.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: Turns out Clyde doesn’t have an accomplice helping him commit these crimes. He built tunnels beneath solitary confinement. As detailed under They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot below, this decision makes little to no sense, and having an accomplice makes much more sense.
• Faux Symbolism:
  • The fires that surround Clyde the last moment we see him in the film before his death.
  • When Sarah and the others are blown up outside the prison, Clyde is shown in priest-like black clothes and white undershirt, fingering his daughter's bracelet which resembles rosary beads.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: At one point, Bray says "spies are a dime a dozen", which was included in the trailer. This unintentionally mirrored a line from Team Fortress 2's trailer "Meet the Spy", which has the Scout saying "[Spies are] dime-a-dozen back-stabbing scumbags!" The payoff? Well, see Law Abiding Engineer.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Clyde. He kills a lot of people, but he had his wife and daughter raped and murdered right in front of him and the main perpetrator got off with a slap on the wrist because Nick the persecutor cared more about getting a perfect conviction score.
  • Ames. Yeah, he was Darby's accomplice, but he only wanted to rob the place, he didn't want to kill anyone. Darby sold him up the river when he tried to stop him. Just before his execution, he says that he regrets ever having been there that night. The fact he died a horrible death is pretty sad.
• Magnificent Bastard: Clyde Shelton, after losing his family to the depraved Clarence Darby, schemes for years, studying law and the city to murder Darby himself, and gets arrested, conniving to pull off a series of attacks against all he holds responsible for Darby's freedom. Seeing the judicial system as inherently corrupt, Shelton holds the city in a grip of terror, making his own demands that most are powerless against, to make his statements against what he views as a corrupt system. The good guys assume Shelton saying he has all kinds of connections to hitmen who successfully kill most of his targets on his behalf is true, but in reality, he's escaping his cell and doing it all himself. Even at the end, when he realizes his life is about to end, Shelton maintains sympathy by dying in a dignified manner, only staring at a bracelet his beloved daughter made him before the end.
• Memetic Mutation: The "Law Abiding Engineer" machinima... Which works a little too well. See here (unless you happen to be from the wrong country, in which case you can't).
• Rooting for the Empire: Most viewers are hard-felt to not be rooting for Shelton's Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the people that wronged him and the system that deliberately let his killer go just to keep up appearances. Many viewers root for Clyde as his background is very tragic while the heroes are incredibly unsympathetic. Especially how Nick let the man who killed Clyde's family get away too easily and does't even seem to care about the fact that Clyde lost his family. Yet, the idea of anything bad happening to his family is his Berserk Button.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: For most of the movie, we are led to believe that Clyde is getting away with his crimes because he has someone helping him on the outside. When we find out that he has no help, and that he has a tunnel system that takes him from his solitary confinement cell to wherever he wants to go to carry out his crimes and back again before anyone notices, many thought him having a partner was better and made more sense, and this twist broke many a suspension of disbelief. If ANYONE checked up on him while he was out committing his crimes, he would have been exposed, plus it means he carried out highly elaborate and sophisticated murders, many of which required precision timing and a level of improvisation, entirely by himself, when again a partner would have been more plausible.
• Too Bleak, Stopped Caring: This feeling hits home for viewers who become increasingly disillusioned with Clyde's actions halfway through the film. Clyde starts off as sympathetic, but he eventually becomes worse than the madman (Darby) who sparked off his rage in the first place. As for the attorneys and lawyers on the other side, they're immoral strawmen made to look as corrupt as possible, except for Sarah, who dies thanks to Clyde. When one realizes Clyde's hypocrisy reaches the level of Jigsaw it's impossible to root for anybody.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic:
  • Ames. Sure, he's a robber, but he still tries to save Shelton's family because Even Evil Has Standards. And yet he gets Disproportionate Retribution from both the system and Shelton (Ungrateful Bastard much?), and the movie tries to paint him as equally an Asshole Victim as Darby, even though he shows clear remorse for his crimes at his execution.
  • Darby's lawyer is even more of a Designated Villain than Ames (who's actually a criminal), yet the movie tries to paint him as an Amoral Attorney who deserves to be Buried Alive. Also, Sarah lampshades that the lawyer had a wife that reported him missing.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: While Nick wasn't supposed to be sympathetic when he cut a deal with Darby and got him off with a slap on the wrist, Nick is still supposed to be seen as sympathetic later after Clyde In-Universe crosses the Moral Event Horizon and kills Sarah with a car bomb. However, many felt that Nick cutting a deal with Darby was his own Moral Event Horizon and were still cheering for Clyde even after all he's done. Not helping is the fact that Nick keeps making excuses for what was ultimately a selfish decision. Even at the end when Nick states that he's done making deals with murderers, this mostly came out of left field, as he never actually thinks on his choices or admits that he was wrong.

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