Losing the Willis to live

DEATH WISH Cert 15 Running time 107 minutes ★

Bruce Willis takes the law into his own hands in this lacklustre and exploitative remake of Charles Bronson’s vigilante thriller. From 1974 to 1994 the five-strong Death Wish series was characterised by ever-diminishing quality. This new one fails to raise the bar too as Willis takes Bronson’s role as Chicago surgeon Paul Kersey.

His life is destroyed when a home invasion goes fatally wrong, leaving his teen daughter in a coma and his wife dead. Tragically, this removes Elisabeth Shue from proceedings, a sorely underused actress who demonstrates she still has the charm she possessed in her breakthrough role as Ralph Macchio’s love interest in 1984’s The Karate Kid. Kersey becomes a cold-blooded killer as he pursues those responsible, and anyone else he feels like shooting.

With his running and punching days long behind him, Willis gives an underpowered performance. His last decent starring role was 2012’s sci-fi time-travel thriller, Looper, and he has since slid down the Hollywood hierarchy to become a supporting character in some poor movies.

On paper this would seem to offer the possibility of a late career comeback in the manner of Liam Neeson and his Taken trilogy. But Willis has misplaced his trademark smirk and lacks the Irishman’s physicality and smouldering menace. Plus the shootouts are perfunctorily staged, the body count is low, and the cartoonish violence betrays the director’s background in horror films as he fails to create a consistent tone.

A thinly-veiled defence of the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms, this is insufficiently exciting to be interesting. And it’s difficult to forgive a film which demonises Chicago’s black and Hispanic population to allow a wealthy white guy to execute them.

My wish for this supposed new franchise is for it to be dead and buried.

With his punching days behind him, Bruce has slid down Hollywood’s hierarchy to be a supporting character in some poor movies