Weekend movie releases
Bruce Willis in “Death Wish” and more.
America. It’s still a free country. Therefore we have to put up with the occasional “Death Wish.”
Some believe the timing of this remake’s release Friday is bad taste incarnate, coming as it does 16 days after the Parkland school massacre. Isn’t there a more appropriate week for a movie glorifying vigilante revenge, and the tightly coiled wrath of the quietly seething middleaged male and his firearms?
Actually: No. There’s no better time to sit with director Eli Roth’s version of “Death Wish.” Sixteen days after Parkland; the same week as our president’s assertion that he would’ve run into that Florida high school and taken care of business, gun or no. Yes, it feels like the week for this movie.
Funny thing: Initially, MGM had this Bruce Willis “Death Wish” reboot scheduled for a Nov. 22, 2017, launch. But a week after last fall’s gun massacre in Las Vegas, the studio thought, well, maybe this isn’t the moment to get audiences jazzed about an NRA dream. So MGM waited, forgetting that America never goes too long between massacres.
Let’s do a background check. Novelist Brian Garfield published “Death Wish” in 1972. His book took a relatively ambiguous stance on vigilantism. The ’74 movie, directed like a seizure by Michael Winner, did not. Its killing sprees cured the grieving widowed husband played by Charles Bronson and led to several sequels. Garfield hated that first movie. He also profited from it, and wrote a sequel to “Death Wish” (“Death Sentence”) as what he termed “penance” for what the Bronson film brought to the culture.
The new film keeps its head down, in a hoodie, and goes about its business with confidence and technical proficiency. The fake brain matter strewn on various flooring surfaces looks realistic indeed.
The first movie exploited 1970s New York City as an urban hellhole. Now it’s Chicago’s turn. An emergency room surgeon at a Chicago hospital, Dr. Paul Kersey lives a fine life in the suburbs with his soon-to-be-doctor wife (Elisabeth Shue) and their NYU-bound daughter (Camila Morrone). There is, however, a lot of aggression in the air. A fellow soccer parent picks a fight with our passive hero, calling him a nickname for female genitalia. Clearly he has some manning-up to do, and “Death Wish” takes care of his needs.
It’s all in the trailer: While Kersey’s away saving lives, three thugs bust into his house and kill his wife and put his daughter in a coma. “We’re gonna get these guys,” Kersey is told by a police detective (Dean Norris), his partner (Kimberly Elise) in tow. But Kersey hasn’t the patience or the optimism. His shotgun-wielding father-in-law (Len Cariou) sets him straight: “People rely on the police to keep them safe. That’s the problem.” The movies have been telling us this forever; this movie is merely the latest.
Kersey gets to it. Soon there are dead drug dealers and a stray deceased carjacker or two. Vincent D’Onofrio plays Kersey’s brother, and he’s always welcome. So is Shue, even in this abbreviated nothing of a role.
For a while, director Roth plays this stuff relatively straight, and Willis periodically reminds us he can act (the grieving Kersey cries a fair bit here). The script contains a reference to AR-15 rifles; by the end, Willis goes full Willis when his adversaries return to the sanctity of the family home. At two points in the action, Roth (“Hostel,” “Hostel 2”) indulges in a split-screen montage depicting Willis removing slugs from chests at the hospital in one panel, while shooting people pointblank in another. Chicago: the city that works. It’s capable of redemption, we’re told, if the right Dr. Kill-Dare comes along to clean up the carnage the American way: more carnage.