15 Years Later A Dark Revenge Thriller Is Back On Top Of Netflix

No one who saw Dracula 2000 would have guessed that 25 years later, the most successful film career wouldn’t belong to Nathan Fillion, Jeri Ryan, or Omar Epps. Instead, it was a relatively unknown actor playing Dracula who became one of the world’s most successful action stars.

Gerard Butler started the century playing Dracula and Attila the Hun before breaking out in 300 and pivoting to the B-action movies that never make blockbuster money on the big screen, but set records on every streaming service. He did it again this month, when 2009’s Law Abiding Citizen arrived on Netflix and debuted in the Top Ten.

Gerard Butler’s Twisted Path Of Revenge

Following the success of Zack Snyder’s 300, it seemed like Butler would have trouble making it to the next level in Hollywood. After an attempt to pivot into rom-coms and the critically derided Gamer, Law Abiding Citizen was a wild turn for the Scottish star; instead of the put-upon grizzled hero, he was the villain. Or a different type of hero, depending on how you choose to look at it.

In Law Abiding Citizen Butler plays Clyde Shelton, a man out for revenge after his wife and daughter are brutally murdered in his own home. The police aren’t able to secure a conviction against one of the assailants, the man who committed the murders, allowing him to turn state’s witness against his partner for a reduced sentence. A decade later, he’s butchered, with a naked Clyde waiting for the cops to take him, but that’s only the start of his revenge.

A cat-and-mouse game starts up between Clyde and Nick (Jamie Foxx), the prosecutor who refused to pursue his family’s murderer to keep his perfect conviction rate intact. From within prison, Clyde is somehow able to orchestrate everything from kidnappings to bobby-trapped cell phones, as everyone connected to his family’s murder is a target. Law Abiding Citizen may stretch the bounds of believability, but when you get to see Butler and Foxx go face to face in a battle of wits, each believing he has the upper hand, you’ll stop worrying about how improbable the plot is and get swept up in a modern morality tale.

Law Abiding Citizen isn’t Shakespeare, but it embraces the darkness Clyde has been living in for the last 10 years, with unflinching, sudden violence and a heavy cynicism towards the justice system. Critics lambasted the film for being far-fetched and not making sense, but audiences loved it, as represented by its dueling Rotten Tomatoes ratings of 26 percent rotten and 75 percent audience approval. Fans flocked to theaters to see Gerard Butler’s revenge tour, bringing in $126 million worldwide, over twice the film’s production budget of $55 million.

Law Abiding Citizen Embraces Its Darkness

At the time, Law Abiding Citizen wasn’t unique with its premise of a good man breaking bad, but after over a decade of films like Nobody, Novacaine, and The Amateur, it still stands out by showing the devastating toll of a life devoted to revenge. No one’s perfect in this film, and given what the current crop of action normcore action films has been like, it’s a breath of fresh air in 2025. After watching the film, you’ll wonder along with everyone else, how it could have worked with Jamie Fox and Gerard Butler’s roles reversed, which is what the plan was in pre-production until an 11th-hour suggestion put them in the perfect roles.

Law Abiding Citizen isn’t the best movie ever made, and it’s not as smart as it thinks it is, but there’s something about it that lets it rise above its B-movie brethren to become a perennial streaming hit on every service it hits. Right now, you can find Law Abiding Citizen on Netflix, where it’s climbing the Top Ten chart every single day as more and more people discover why Gerard Butler is one of the most successful movie stars on the planet.