There always seems to be that telling moment in any long running franchise where it morphs into something so far removed from its original concept, it either stand as an act or idiocy, genius or – quite often – both. Freddy Krueger became a jokester, Dominic Toretto’s extended family became super spies and James Bond went from smoldering killer, to gadget laden punster and back again in order to meet the demands of the masses as they wanted bigger and crazier outings for their heroes.
However, possibly the most audacious tonal shift belongs to the glossy urban sleaze of Michael Winner’s Death Wish franchise that had already seen the uncomfortable moral questions of the first movie give way to some impressively iffy politics once the notoriously bombastic Cannon Group got their sweaty mitts on the rights. With Death Wish 3, however, the shoot-them-all-and-let-God-sort-them-out nature of the series became something else entirely as the continuing exploits of the consistently exhausted looking Paul Kersey went into full cartoon mode to hilarious effect.
For reasons that the script chooses not not bother with, the career vigilante decides to defy his decade long banishment and return to New York a short year after he brought his cordite stained brand of justice to Los Angeles. He’s here to visit an old war colleague but his luck regarding the life expectancy of his associates is running true to form after his buddy is conveniently (for the running time at least) beaten to death in his apartment mere minutes before Paul arrives.
The cops arrive and arrest Kersey with precious little due process, but while he languishes in the local lock up surrounded by animalistic neanderthals, he’s approached by Police Chief Richard Shriker who not only recognizes him from his original, NY rampage, but plans to use his arrest to leverage him into lowering the local crime rate. Released back onto the streets, Kersey moves into his old war buddy’s apartment and sets about protecting the rest of the residents of the apartment block from the seemingly endless gang members (one of whom is Bill & Ted’s Alex Winter!) who are led by the deranged lunatic known as Manny Fraker.
After receiving an unbelievably powerful hand gun via mail order (fucking 80s America, dude), Kersey sets about taking old Jewish couple, the Kaprovs; young Hispanic couple, the Rodriguezs and war veteran Bennett Cross under his heavily armed wing, but as the body count of Fraker’s gang steadily rises, the push back proves to be equally brutal as this game of bloody tit-for-tat escalates wildly.
With the collateral damage steadily rising, Kersey remains steadfast in his grim task, ordering more tools of mass destruction in the post and setting traps for criminals that allows him to casually shoot them down in the middle of a crowded street with impunity.
Soon the dam breaks and it’s a literal all out war on the streets of New York as the moustached vigilante does what he does best against an army of freaks and psychos.
There is absolutely no way in hell that Death Wish 3 could be described as a “good” movie. It’s insultingly dumb, it’s politics are horrendous and the sight of an obviously winded Charles Bronson mowing down waves of drugged-up degenerates is as unlikely as Chalton Heston turning his nose up at the NRA. However, the movie takes its exaggerated nature so far into the realms of right wing fantasy that it somehow becomes a magnificently silly slice of exploitation insanity.
While the franchise once attempted waded the in same social commentary waters as Don Segel’s Dirty Harry, Death Wish 3 now had more in common with Italian urban dystopia thrillers like 1990: The Bronx Warriors or brutal Namploitation flicks like The Exterminator and under the haphazard eye of the Cannon Group, the carnage reached dangerously childish levels. However, the preposterous nature of the film means that all the legitimately obnoxious aspects of the story looses a lot of its impact, leaving all the violence and death to have all the gravity of a sideways scrolling arcade beat-em up. The bad guys are so outlandishly vicious, they might as well have walked straight out of a Final Fight or Streets Of Rage game with their leader (an absurdly intense Gavan O’Herlihy from Superman III) sporting arguably the worst hair style ever seen on cinematic gang leader. But while they rape, mug, murder and slice the throats of little old ladies, it almost all becomes abstract and therefore tough to take the lazily frenzied attempts of Michael Winner to be controversial seriously while as the majority of the cast wander about like NPCs simply waiting for some atrocity to come their way. Is the treatment of Star Trek’s Marina Sirtis (as a character and an actress) horribly distasteful? Incredibly – but Winner phones everything in so much, everyone who isn’t Bronson, is merely meat for the machine – even the random, tacked on love interest.
If the movie wasn’t so exaggerated, its excesses would be genuinely shocking, but shot through the excitable coke-haze of an 80s Cannon production, it proves to be a questionable goldmine of dubious comedy. Background characters cheer excitedly with all the subtlety of a Troma film at the sight of a notorious purse snatched getting drilled by a handgun with the stopping power of a hunting rifle; Ed Lauter’s strong arming police chief suddenly switches from a rights withholding cop to splay-legged action hero so rapidly I’m surprised the actor didn’t get whiplash; the imposing bad guy is vanquished by Kersey shooting him almost point blank with a rocket launcher he’s got stuffed down the back of his sofa and through it all, Bronson lopes through it, casually chopping up thugs with a Browning M1919A4 like he’s waving a leaf blower about and desperately trying to look younger in a trendy leather jacket. To suggest that the craggy lead was rapidly getting over the hill may be an obvious cheap shot, but at this point in the series, if the guy was any more long in the tooth he’d be a fucking sabre toothed tiger and the fact that he instantly moves on from any personal tragedy proves that by now he’s probably more unbalanced than the maniacs he kills.
Essentially a non-western reworking of that old story of a gunslinger walking into town and teaching the humble population to fight back against their Bandit oppressors, Death Wish 3 is so spectacularly tone deaf that trash movie lovers and Cannon enthusiasts will no doubt think they’ve caught a stray bullet and arrived in heaven.
Stupid, crass and abandoning any pretence of realism that made the second movie so off-puttingly squirm-worthy – and that’s just the good points – Death Wish 3 may be impressively irresponsible, but it’s gung-ho trashiness also proves to be a welcome respite from the grimy starkness of what came before.
Prepare for a blitzkrieg of a highly debatable calibre.
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