There’s not many genres I have trouble stomaching. Slashers? No problem. Italian cannibal movies? Sure, why not? Torture porn? A cakewalk. However, if there’s something have have real trouble sitting through, it’s the rape/revenge thriller, a grotty little subgenre that’s always sat uneasy with me when being described as entertainment.
Some manage to frame one of society’s most heinous acts as devastating and controversial art house (Irreversible) while other take a more exploitative route. But while infamous movies such as I Spit On Your Grave and Wes Craven’s The Last House On The Left took a more exploitative approach, they still offered up some catharsis or even some social commentary among the uncomfortable sleaze.
However, Michael Winner’s Death Wish II stands as a movie that uses its painfully graphic scenes of sexual violence solely to justify Charles Bronson’s architect/vigilante going on another personal mission of vengence as yet more members of his personal life are ravaged by animalistic street punks.
Around eight years have passed since architect Paul Keresy turned to vigilantism in order to make sense of the world after deranged criminals killed his wife and traumatised his daughter into a catatonic haze and after being exiled from New York, we find that he’s rebuilt a new life in L.A.. Things seem to be going well; he’s in a relationship with reporter Geri Nichols and his daughter, Carol, is almost starting to come back after years of therapy – but after he has a run in with a bunch of wallet stealing street punks, his life becomes yet another nightmare after they find out where he lives and kidnaps his daughter after raping and murdering his housekeeper. Matters somehow get even more tragic when Carol kills herself rather than spending another moment in the company of the brutal Nivana and his leering gang of hooligans.
Kersey takes the news about as well as you’d expect (a seething rage that’s all but imperceptible on the surface of his craggy features) and before you can mumble the words “justifiable homicide”, he’s back to his old tricks as he stalks the streets with a Berreta 84 hidden in his pocket.
However, while before he had no way to track down and execute his wife’s killers, now, by extraordinary feats of cinematic luck, Paul manages to track down these latest perpetrators one by one and riddle them with so many holes you could use them as a colander.
However, two things stand in the way of Kersey achieving his goal, with the first being the NYPD sending Detective Ochoa out to cover their ass (they did let him go, after all) and the second seeing the hulking Nivana get sent to a psychiatric ward. But much like a psychotic mounties, Paul Kersey always gets his man… and kills them.
It’s somewhat of a weird connection to make, but when comparing the first Death Wish to its morally simpler and disturbingly bull-headed sequel, I can’t help be reminded of the comparison between Rocky and Rocky II. The first movie was a hard-edged drama that saw vaguely realistic plot decisions steer the story into areas of the unexpected; Rocky never actually won that big fight against Apollo Creed and Paul Kersey never confronted the actual criminals who inflicted the horrible violence upon his family. However, a sense of ambiguity was promptly swept aside by sequels that simplified things to more hollywood levels of wish fulfillment, however, while the escalation of a put-upon boxer from Philly meant he had to go through a wife-in-a-coma to earn his title, what Paul Kersey’s family has to go through for him to provide stepping on a gun is far less tasteful.
Michael Winner has never been the most subtle director, but at least Brian Garfield’s source novel gave him some thematic balance to work with. However, now that the series was now in the hands Golan and Globus and the notoriously unsubtle Cannon Group, Winner’s handle on the situation becomes almost unfathomably blunt, stooping to distasteful extremes to cast anti-hero Kersey as an out and out hero.
Now, if you want to have your hero step out into the night with a woolly back hat and a firearm and tack back the night, then do so – but let the audience make up their own mind about where their morals land – Winner, instead hedges his bets by taking that old Hollywood adage “if you want to kill a man on the third act, have him slap a woman in the first” and taking it to near intolerable levels.
The result is a notoriously extended rape sequence that feels endless at best and utterly reprehensible at worst as the gang (one of whom is placed by Laurence fucking Fishburn) inflict unspeakable horrors upon a poor actress while Winner seemingly sees it as a perfect excuse to cram as many bare breasts as he can into the film.
Naturally, when Bronson’s wronged father comes back out of vigilante retirement, it’s obviously (and very deliberately) a relief when he starts blowing sizable holes in the men responsible and its here where Death Wish II becomes remotely watchable. Winner’s handling of the more sensitive subjects may lurch into the realms of being genuinely offensive, he sure knows how to make Bronson seem iconic when he’s lowering the criminal population of L.A. one goon at a time. “You believe in Jesus?” asks Bronson of one victim in the drawling tone before he plugs him, “Well, you’re gonna meet him.”.
The movie even reintroduces Vincent Gardenia’s Detective Ochoa only to have him cut down in a hail of bullets just so he can give Kersey his dying, seal of approval with a weak “Get the motherfucker for me.” before he croaks.
Brian Garfield was reported so horrified by the Kersey’s transformation into a righteous hero that he wrote his own sequel, Death Sentence (which was adapted loosely by Saw’s James Wan in 2007) and it’s hard to disagree with him as this shamelessly manipulative and thoroughly unpleasant thriller ultimately leaves more of a bad taste in your mouth than a face full of cordite.
While it’s certainly debatable whether the Death Wish franchise managed to equal the squalid depths of this installment (although Part 3’s Marina Sirtis might have a few things to say about that), the directorial and character choices made here certainty sees the glossy, Hollywood, rape/revenge movie at its most reprehensible and certainly most irresponsible.
Duff wish.
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