Smirking Bruce should be ashamed of reboot
Photo: Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Pictures
MOVIE: Death Wish
STARRING: Alicia Vikander, Walton Goggins, Hannah John-Kamen RATING: R18+ SHOWING AT: Grand Central REVIEWER: Vicky Roach 1/5
SHAME on you, Bruce Willis.
Death Wish isn’t entertainment. It’s a thinly disguised apologia for the US gun lobby (and its reactionary counterparts in Australia).
The timing of the film’s release – in the wake of the Parkland, Florida high school shooting – could not be more offensive.
But even on its own terms, this 12gauge remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson vigilante movie of the same name misfires badly.
Willis sleepwalks through his performance as Dr Paul Kersey, the leading trauma surgeon who goes rogue when a bunch of barbaric home invaders shoot his wife (Elisabeth Shue) and daughter in cold blood.
The trademark smirk that worked so well for the 62-year-old actor in the Die Hard movies has now stiffened into something more reminiscent of an involuntary muscle twitch.
And there are no running wisecracks, here, to lighten the tone.
Instead, Willis slugs – or slogs – it out as a doctor who violently rejects the Hippocratic oath when police investigators fail to bring his wife’s killers to justice.
Vincent D’Onofrio lends what natural warmth he can to the role of Kersey’s loyal but down-on-his-luck younger brother.
While his daughter (Camila Morrone) lies in her hospital bed in a coma, Kersey walks the streets of Chicago shooting muggers and car jackers wherever he encounters them (usually dark alleys).
Identifying one of his wife’s killers by a tattoo, Kersey’s behaviour becomes even more extreme.
For a man who has devoted his career thus far to saving lives, he now exhibits an alarming sadistic streak.
The scene in which Kersey slices through to the villain’s sciatic nerve, before squirting caustic brake fluid into the wound to maximise the agony, is a powerful reminder of director Eli Roth’s dubious former credentials – as the man behind the 2005 horror porn Hostel franchise.
Roth, a filmmaker who fetishises cruelty, encourages his audience to cheer each victim’s demise.
Kersey is action man tough – sealing his own gun wound with a tube of superglue.
But it’s the arrangement the vigilante comes to with Dean Norris’s veteran detective at the end of Death Wish that delivers the film’s most disturbing message.
Death Wish is now showing.