Death Wish is, of course, a remake of the classic 1974 film starring Charles Bronson (which was already kinda, sorta remade as the 2007 Kevin Bacon film Death Sentence, but that’s complicated). Although I generally detest modern remakes, I was somewhat curious about the direction that this movie would take because the original five-film Death Wish series was a bit erratic. Similar to the Rambo series, people often forget that the original Death Wish is a pretty serious and somber movie about a man pushed to his limits by some terrible circumstances. The violence in the original Death Wish is grimy, realistic and disturbing and the hero isn’t an action hero at all; he’s just a normal guy that turns to violence and even becomes physically ill the first time that he shoots someone. That’s all lost by Death Wish 3, where he is running around the streets of New York with a belt-fed machine gun and mowing down crowds of people without even stopping to confirm that they are actually criminals. That’s not a knock on Death Wish 3, which should have won Best Picture that year (the academy inexplicably gave the award to Amadeus, which featured zero instances of elderly people being set on fire by street thugs). So my question going into this was whether this film would remake the serious tone of the original or the Wile E. Coyote-ish violence of the sequels. It actually does neither.
Bruce Willis takes over for Charles Bronson in the role of Paul Kersey, who is a doctor in this version instead of an architect like in the original. Paul’s home is broken into and both his wife and daughter are shot as the result of a botched robbery. The wife dies, the daughter survives. Dissatisfied with the progress being made by the local police, Paul decides to take it to the streets of Chicago and start shooting bad guys himself.
Aside from Paul’s change of profession, the basic plot is similar to the original film (though I also could have been describing about a hundred other revenge/vigilante films). But what’s frustrating is the complete tonal shift from the original and the lack of depth in Paul’s character arc. The assault on Paul’s family in the original film is fucking brutal. While the daughter also survives in that film, both of them are raped and the daughter lives in a permanent state of shock in a psychiatric hospital. It also isn’t a botched robbery in the original; they were simply attacked for the hell of it. In this version, they aren’t raped, they are shot off-camera and there is financial motivation for the crime. These changes only make the film seem less threatening, as animalistic violence is replaced by mere greed and incompetence. I’m not saying that the movie needs graphic scenes of rape and murder to make its point, but this movie completely pulls its punches and eliminates the dramatic impact of the material.
Paul also doesn’t experience the gradual descent into despair and violence that he does in the original. He decides pretty quickly to become The Punisher despite the fact that he has never even owned a gun. As a sidenote, it’s humorously obvious that whoever wrote this movie has never owned a gun and did all of their research on the subject by watching CNN, as Paul just has to fill out a form at the cash register to buy a fully-automatic (i.e., illegal) assault rifle. Anyway, there is very little inner turmoil on display in Willis’s performance. He doesn’t even go after his wife’s killers right away; he just starts stopping random crimes until he finally remembers that he should probably start addressing that whole dead-wife issue. In the original film, Bronson is clearly uncomfortable the first time that he handles a gun. In this, Willis assembles his first gun while AC/DC’s Back in Black is blasting (the choice of song doesn’t even make sense because he isn’t “back,” this is the first time that he is doing this shit). There is no depth or arc to this character, he just kind of nonchalantly decides “fuck it, I’m a vigilante now.” The movie can’t decide if he should be an everyman or an action hero and, consequently, it pulls off neither.
It isn’t as serious as the original, but it also isn’t as over-the-top as the sequels. If you are going to be stupid, then you need to embrace the stupid. Don’t half-ass it. With the exception of one exploding head (this is from the director of Hostel and The Green Inferno, after all), the film is surprisingly restrained. It could easily even be a PG-13, which is something I never thought that I would say about a Death Wish film. There aren’t any major action setpieces and most of the action is designed to be both realistic and unimpactful, which makes for quite an uninteresting 90 minutes. Bronson at least broke out a bazooka when he was in a silly movie to liven shit up.
In a way, this movie encompasses a lot of my issues with modern films and, especially, remakes. There is nothing noteworthy about it and there is no reason for it to exist except to make use of a copyright. It isn’t awful, it’s just kind of there and won’t be remembered six months from now. It has neither the intellect and balls to replicate the original or the fuck-it attitude to recreate the craziness of the sequels. It’s just a forgettable thing that exists because an executive at MGM woke up one day and remembered that he had the rights to Death Wish. That isn’t a reason to make a movie and there is no reason to see this.
Image By: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_Wish_(2018_film)#/media/File:Death_wish_2017_poster.jpg
