Movie Review: Death Wish

Death Wish ** / *****

Directed by: Eli Roth.

Written by: Joe Carnahan based on the novel by Brian Garfield and the screenplay by Wendell Mayes.

Starring: Bruce Willis (Paul Kersey), Vincent D'Onofrio (Frank Kersey), Elisabeth Shue (Lucy Kersey), Camila Morrone (Jordan Kersey), Dean Norris (Detective Kevin Raines), Beau Knapp (Knox), Kimberly Elise (Detective Leonore Jackson), Len Cariou (Ben), Jack Kesy (The Fish), Ronnie Gene Blevins (Joe), Kirby Bliss Blanton (Bethany).

 

I can easily see a way that a version of Death Wish could be updated, and relevant, for 2018 – but the version directed by Eli Roth is not that film. The 1974 original starred Charles Bronson, as a man pushed too far, after his wife and daughter victims of a home invasion – the wife raped and murdered, the daughter raped and traumatized – Bronson decides to strike back at the “animals” who did this too his family – even if he doesn’t really know who those people are. That spoke to audiences in 1974 – when violent crime in America really was on the rise, and people in major cities were afraid to go out at night. In 2018, violent crime is actually down – the lowest it’s been in decades – but there are places (Fox News, the NRA among them) who still want to make people afraid – it’s good for business. I think a new version of Death Wish should at least address that. But this movie doesn’t really do that – it is basically a feature length version of the NRA tagline “Nothing will stop a bad guy with a gun, except a good guy with a gun”.

 

This time the movie takes place in Chicago, not New York (it’s no coincidence, they’ve picked the most violent city in America), and Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) is now a surgeon, not an architect (or an accountant, as he was in the original novel). He has a beautiful wife (Elisabeth Shue) and teenage daughter (Camila Morrone) about to go off to college. The same basic thing happens as in the original – a trio of thugs break into the house when Paul isn’t there – his wife ends up dead, his daughter in a coma (thankfully, the movie spares us of either of them getting raped, although the threat is certainly there with the daughter). Paul ends up getting himself a gun, and going out onto the streets to get revenge on all the bad people out there. Two detectives, Raines and Jackson (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) try to find out who attacked his family. When Kersey visits Raines at work one day, and sees a bulletin board full of open homicides, he is assured that most of those crimes are gang related – “asshole on asshole” crimes that won’t be solved. But Kersey’s case is different. He doesn’t say why, but then again, he doesn’t need to.

 

The movie gets bloody – as you expect from a movie from Roth. He lingers over one scene of torture in particular, but all of the violence in the film is over-the-top in how bloody and ridiculous it can be. Roth cannot seem to decide if he wants to go full on exploitation and fun with the violence (hell, there’s a scene in which one of the bad guy literally gets hit in the head with a bowling ball) or he wants to make something where the violence hurts – where you feel it in the audience.

 

The original novel that Death Wish is based on is actually very anti-vigilante justice – the novel’s Paul Kersey essentially goes insane, and by the end of the novel is killing unarmed kids because he doesn’t like the way they look. He even wrote a sequel after the original movie came out to make his stance even more explicit (that book was turned into a much better, underseen movie by James Wan in 2007 – although it doesn’t have all that much to do with the novel either). The original movie at least pays lip service to being anti-vigilante as well – the cop investigating the crimes figures out who is behind them, and wants to arrest him – but his hands are tied by the higher ups. No matter what Roth says in interviews about the film (and by the way, whenever I read interviews with Roth, I am always struck by the feeling that I would really like the movie he thought he made – it just rarely matches the movie he actually made), that’s basically gone here. There is one good sequence in the film – a montage of Kersey the surgeon removing bullets from shooting victims, and Kersey the vigilante dad loading his gun that points out the absurdity of the two sides of him), but the film never really delves into that. There are talk radio montages that debate the killings Kersey does – when he becomes a social media celebrity the “Grim Reaper” because of YouTube videos of him in action.

 

I think much of this undercut though by the fact that unlike the original novel or film, this Kersey actually does track down those responsible for hurting his family. It’s harder to question that sort of justice being meted out against people we know are guilty, and have seen do horrible things. This Kersey is far easier to understand and root for.

 

Willis is probably the wrong actor to play this role – but then again, so was Bronson (originally, the 1974 film was supposed to be directed by Sidney Lumet, and Jack Lemmon was to star – Bronson always said that he thought the role should have gone to Dustin Hoffman – although, Hoffman did a version of it in Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs in 1971). Willis is an action hero, so we immediately accept him as a killing machine and a hero. The film is essentially a fantasy version for every civilian with a gun, who knows – just KNOWS – that if he was at that school, that concert, that mall when that asshole started shooting everyone with an AR-15, that he would run in, and put an end to it. There was a possibility that a new Death Wish could reflect on, or at least mirror, the America that exists today. This isn’t that film.