Action movies are literally stuffed with main characters taking the law into their own hands and yet most of the time, when a cop has to step outside the law, or an ex-military type has to turn back to their killing ways to save the day, we’re required to cheer them on in their heroic endeavours. However, with the original string of Death Wish movies, that desire to cheer them on was tainted by the fact that with these particular glorifications of violence were a bit too lurid to celebrate than the others.
Hypocrisy? Maybe, but watching Arnold Schwarzenegger obliterate faceless goons with impunity in order to rescue his young daughter in Commando was one thing, watching Charles Bronson’s humble architect turn angel of death after the drawn out rape/murder of countless wifes, daughters and girlfriends always felt a little skeevy no matter now cartoonish the franchiss eventually got – but apparently Eli Roth never got that memo, because in 2018, he helmed a remake that I’m pretty certain no one asked for that featured none other than Bruce Willis in the role of the scowling, vengeful, Paul Kersey.
Loving surgeon Paul Kersey lives a picturesque life with his family in a Chicago that’s seeing shocking rises in gun crime almost on a nightly basis. However, nothing helps Paul see the good in the world after a long shift of extracting bullets out of people, than celebrating with his wife, Lucy, and his brother, Frank, when he hears that his daughter, Jordan, has been accepted by the university of her choice.
However, that life gets rapidly turned upside down like a jelly mold when, on a night where he has to work an emergency shift, burglars descend on his home to mistakenly find Lucy and Jordan still there and tragedy soon ensues. With Lucy in the morgue and Jordan in a coma, a distraught, powerless Paul is dragged into a state of despair until he finds a disturbing novel way to turn his existential dread into something more practical by the way of urban vigilantism.
Heading out into the night dressed in a hoodie and armed with a gangbangers gun he picked up off the floor of his operating room, Kersey exercises his violent sense of civic duty by first getting into a running gun battle with a couple of would-be car jackets and then moves up the criminal food chain by taking out a known drug dealer in broad daylight.
The cops are stunned, but social media goes fucking nuts, branding him the “grim reaper” and making him the hot topic of the hour via endless radio chat shows and podcasts across the city. But just when it seems that Kersey’s aimless quest to bring order back the streets might burn out, he gets a clue that may lead him to the men who destroyed his family – but can he get to them before the police get to him?
One of the biggest issues about Eli Roth’s Death Wish is mainly that of unfortunate timing, as the movie’s release was initially put back to avoid coinciding with a mass shooting that had occured on Las Vegas only for it to actually come out a couple of weeks removed from yet another high shooting, this time in Florida and while this probably says more about gun crime in America than the potential corrupting influence of a Bruce Willis movie, the parallels are tough to ignore.
However, upon removing Death Wish 2018 from the controversy reveals it to be not much more than just your average revenge flick with an starry cast that squanders any opportunity to elevate the material by creating a measured story that invites intelligent debate. Instead, Roth seems happy enough to stage frenzied gun battles and have criminals killed in a myriad of absurd ways like having bowling ball bonkers one on the head causing him to blow his own brains out, or having a car fall on another and pulping his skull like a pinata full of grey matter.
Still, if you want an exploitation film, then you hire an exploitation guy and even though this is Roth’s first action film, he approaches it with the right attention to detail to make it work on the most basic if levels. Choosing not to go down the sensationalist route of Michael Winner who would often glorify the crime as well as the retribution (the rape scene in part 2 is genuinely inexcusable), the script instead allows us to spend more time with Kersey as he gradually evolves from a gun wielding opportunist to a well oiled killing machine and in the lead role, Willis wisely avoids turning Kersey into a just a vengeance fueled variant of John McClane (Death Hard? Die Wish?).
He manages to emote probably more in one movie than Bronson managed in his entire run, shedding tears and glowering in equal measure, but to Willis’ credit, it’s probably one of the better, later, performances he’d done in a career that was noticably heading more and more into the realms of direct-to-streaming. He gets stuck into the action just as much as the acting and he hits all the necessary beats as he’s given ample support by the likes of Vincent D’Onofrio’, Elizabeth Shue and Dean Norris.
However, while there was a chance here to maybe help a Death Wish movie be a bit more balanced, the script written by Joe Carnahan still insists on portraying Kersey as an out and out hero despite all the tutting and disapproving shaking of heads that goes on around him. Yes, the movie plainly agrees that he’s breaking the law, but it’ll be damned if it’ll let its lead actually get punished for his misdeeds in order to create any sort of balance and any hopes for a more ambiguous ending along the lines of James Wan’s far grittier Death Sentence are dashed by the movie ghoulishly playing AC/DC’s Back In Black blare over the end credits as Kersey walks away, consequence free.
For those looking for yet another slick, empty, vigilante movie will find it a noticable step up from your average Taken sequel, but anyone hoping that Roth might add some more searching layers to a franchise that’s famous for dodging complicated answers in favour of an impressive body count may wonder why anyone chose to bother.
Best filed with the the remake of The Last House On The Left as yet another redux that kind of misses the whole point, when treated as just another edgy thriller, Willis’ Death Wish is an undemanding, violent, thriller. However, when it comes to holding itself accountable for its actions, or asking some thornier moral questions, this new Death Wish is ironically unwilling to pull the trigger.
🌟🌟
We Have Issues 