The remake of aging tough guy Charles Bronson’s Death Wish now stars aging tough guy Bruce Willis in a film of the same name. The original was filmed around the time of a real subway vigilante killing in NYC. The new movie relocates to Chicago where there’s a real world murder problem, thus the film seeks to update its theme of ordinary guy taking on crime in a real-world environment.
Basic premise: Everyman surgeon (?) Bruce Willis has a loving wife and daughter getting ready to go to college. One day while he’s at work, criminals break into his home, murder his wife, and put his daughter in a coma. Feeling like he couldn’t uphold his duties as a husband, father, and a man, he goes out on the streets to clean up crime.
The film really (but only occasionally) wants to have something to say about crime, guns, and vigilante justice. It has a lot of radio DJ talk about the rights of citizens when the cops can’t help and other references to whether he’s doing the right thing or not. But it’s a movie and it wants too much to entertain so most of that is just lip service to a revenge fantasy.
There are two main problems with this thoroughly “just ok” movie. The first is Bruce Willis. Way back when Die Hard was new, Bruce Willis could convincingly play an everyman, an average joe caught up in circumstances. But thirty years later, he’s just kind of Bruce Willis walking through a movie where he’s supposed to be a meek everyman. He’s not a good enough actor – and I do love me some Bruce Willis – to pull this off… or he just didn’t care enough to try. To be clear, he’s not bad in the movie… he’s just not trying to play his character.
And that leads to the second problem with the movie. It’s way too long for its basic revenge movie storyline. To its credit, the film does strive to create an average guy home life for Willis but when Willis isn’t trying very hard then the setup doesn’t really work well and adds a burdensome 30 minutes onto a 2 hour film. The movie doesn’t exactly drag, but it feels bloated and ungainly given what should should be a short, mean little film.
The movie is directed by Eli Roth who never saw a splatter moment he doesn’t want to hit with a blood squib. He’s a willing exploitation film maker who usually does everything he can to get his game audience to squirm and shriek. Death Wish, despite its lurid plot, is actually his most mature and mainstream movie. When it’s not reveling in some brief shock value violence, he’s making a slower paced, more thoughtful movie. He doesn’t always succeed and he still has some graphic moments of heavy violence, but this does feel like an evolution of his film making.
But, yeah, in the long run the movie is just ok. It’s not an unwatchable disaster (unless you can’t handle the idea of a gun-toting civilian and/or its brief moments of gore) but it’s still an uneven movie. I’ve seen much worse films and, if the original hadn’t aged so poorly, I’d say it was a better one (but not its terrible sequels).
As an aside, the novel these films were based on (also called Death Wish) had a sequel called Death Sentence. That was made into a better revenge thriller starring Kevin Bacon back in 2007. That’s a better flick. Still pulpy, but better made and more engaging (plus Kevin Bacon is more convincing, not having played a hero all his life).
Score: 76