Death Wish ... it’s not just a title
It’s how you’ll feel after seeing this mindless BLAM!-fest
The signature scene in Death Wish, Eli Roth’s gruesome, unnecessary remake of the 1974 original, is a split-screen montage of Bruce Willis’s character, Paul Kersey. He’s an ER surgeon in a Chicago hospital who’s just palmed a handgun that fell from the pocket of a trauma victim, and he’s learning how to use it. So, on the left wing of the screen is Paul removing bullets from people, while the right wing shows him practising how to put them back in, only much faster.
Whether you find this amusing, stupid, heroic or dangerous may depend on what side of the screen you sit on, politically speaking. But make no mistake: Death Wish, even more than its predecessor (which looks so genteel these 44 years later), is a call to arms, suggesting that the only thing better than one gun for every law-abiding citizen is two.
Willis’s character, like Charles Bronson before him, is, to be fair, pushed further than most Americans. His wife (Elisabeth Shue) is killed when burglars break into his home; his daughter (Camila Morrone) is left in a coma. And then his father-in-law, after the funeral in Texas, fires on a poacher and declares: “If a man wants to protect what’s his, he has to do it himself.” He punctuates this
command with a shotgun BLAM! that echoes through the rest of the movie.
And THEN the gun falls off the operating table. And THEN Paul gets beat up when trying to stop a random mugging. And THEN, suitably armed, he witnesses a carjacking and steps in to stop it, lethally. And THEN he treats a young gunshot victim who provides him with all the information he needs for his next deserving target. And THEN, I kid you not, he is saved from someone’s return fire when a wobbly bowling ball falls on the guy’s head.
Detectives Raines and Jackson (Dean Norris, Kimberly Elise) can’t solve the case of the so-called Grim Reaper vigilante, probably because even they can’t believe how many wild coincidences are required for him to operate.
They do start edging closer to a solution when the good doctor gets a bead on his family’s attackers, and Death Wish starts slipping from pure, faceless vigilantism into the more traditional territory of personal vengeance. You could change the movie’s title at this point, but the one I’m thinking of is Taken.
None of this matters to Roth, who takes a screenplay by
Joe Carnahan (The Grey, The A-Team) and adds blood and guts as only the writer-director of Hostel and Hostel: Part II can. He also throws in AC/DC’s Back in Black, a wildly overused bit of hard rock that has appeared in Black Hawk Down, Iron Man, The Muppets and more — the only reason it wasn’t in the original Death Wish is that it wouldn’t be written for another six years.
Willis keeps the same stoic look on his face throughout, while Vincent D’Onofrio struggles to keep pace as Kersey’s layabout brother, and a motley collection of forgettable baddies act as fodder to Willis’s cannon. (You can tell who the villains are because they all received the same direction: “Don’t shave!”) Morrone, playing the comatose daughter, deserves an acting prize for keeping a straight face while unconscious.
I had an easier time of it, given the screenplay’s minimal attempts at humour, as when Willis sits down with his therapist, visibly relaxed after a night of scumbag bloodletting, and she blithely tells him: “Whatever you’re doing, keep it up.” Tee hee.
There is room in motion pictures for thoughtful and nuanced stories about violence, its uses and its dangers, but Death Wish 1974 was not such a beast, and Death Wish 2018 is even less so. (Come to think of it, Death Wish 2018 sounds like a 1974 movie about a dystopian future where the biathlon allows Olympic participants to shoot at each other.)
Roth stokes his film with talkradio hosts playing themselves and voicing the pros and cons of vigilante justice, but it doesn’t change the fact that we’re asked to identify with nice-guy Willis at every turn, and told he’s doing the right thing with every bullet that leaves his gun. Death Wish makes a mild show of being even-handed, but all its anti-gun arguments are blanks.