After the sentences were passed, Elias walked the marble floors alone. A young clerk passed him a cup of coffee without looking him in the eye; a reporter took a picture that would run the next day. He wanted to say that his work was done, but language betrayed him. There was no vengeance that replaced absence.

The film starts as a gripping, emotional tragedy but quickly shifts into an over-the-top "cat-and-mouse" game. It is often compared to the Saw franchise because of its creative and gruesome traps.

Butler is widely praised for his intense, menacing performance as the mastermind. Foxx plays a solid foil as the ambitious prosecutor, though his character is often seen as less sympathetic.

The first of them—Marcus Hale—was found late one night at his townhouse with a letter on the kitchen table and the scent of gunpowder in the gutter outside. The letter was not a confession; it was a sequence of receipts and dates, the same materials Elias had gathered and given to Lawton, now sent to Marcus’s former partners, the press, the prosecutor’s inbox. The police came. Marcus said nothing at first, because what could he say? He had been counseled in how to speak to police after his plea; the scripts failed when facts multiplied.

: Available on stores like Apple TV/iTunes , Google TV , and Vudu/Fandango at Home .