Death Wish misses the point

Bruce Willis and Ronnie Gene Blevins in Death Wish. Image courtesy MGM.

On the most basic, surface level view, Eli Roth’s remake Death Wish is fine. It’s sometimes a little campy, shot in a style that is neither appealing nor unappealing. The thrills are there, the blood is copious, and the deaths are grotesque in the Roth style. For what it is, Death Wish isn’t particularly interesting or groundbreaking. But it isn’t a catastrophe, and nothing about the surface levels screams incompetence. It exists to earn Bruce Willis some more money and revitalize his persona as an action star, and it does that to a degree. Looking at the movie as a basic piece of cinema obscures the grotesqueness Roth and writer Joe Carnahan created on screen. The message they have is an utter mess, either completely missing or gleefully ignoring the points of the 1974 Charles Bronson flick and the original novel about the inhumanity that comes from a quest for revenge. Their Death Wish isn’t even interesting enough to qualify as morally reprehensible; rather, it’s morally stupid.

Death Wish has little interest in holding Willis’ Paul Kersey to the fire for blasting people around Chicago. Roth and Carnahan justify it as a quest for revenge against the men who hurt his daughter (Camila Morrone) and murdered his wife (Elisabeth Shue). The expectation is to root for Kersey as he straight murders criminals and puts innocent people at risk as he gallivants around Chicago hunting people for sport. And this is a sport for Kersey, an after-work or weekend activity to engage in between saving people’s lives as a surgeon because it’s somehow the “right” thing to do. That he disobeys the most basic sense of law and order is not a factor for the filmmakers; they want viewers to cheer wildly for their “hero” as a savior for the people of Chicago (or at least the white people). Kersey should not be depicted as a hero; at best he could be viewed as complex, although neither Willis’ performance nor the script make Kersey appear overly complicated.

Death Wish should be a gritty movie. It needs to make people squirm from the violence on screen and the implications of revenge, showing how a man who seeks revenge becomes the monster he seeks to slay. It needs to make people second guess their thoughts about heroism and just be incredibly brutal. The original nails that aesthetic, due in large part to the 1970s-era New York City setting and Bronson’s cold demeanor. Bronson veers so close to crossing the line between good and evil he is often comparable to a slasher horror villain like Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees, an unrelenting machine designed to kill for the sake of killing. That Death Wish is often uncomfortable to watch because of how little regard Kersey has for life.

Roth and Carnahan go the other way with their interpretation. It’s too shiny and polished for a movie about moral decrepitude, too willing to wrap things up in a nice tidy bow and make the decisions for the audience. Their decision to make Kersey’s pursuit about justice for his family instead of vengeance against societal evils washes the characters hands of the mayhem he has brought to the city of Chicago. Even the way Roth frames the murders Kersey commits removes the discomfort from the whole scenario. Roth is outlandish in his deaths, showing as much blood and mush and guts as possible, transforming an act of brutality into a cartoonish farce. It can work in the right setting, for movies in which the fun comes from silly violence, but it doesn’t work when the point is to be ugly and cruel and to question the lead character’s motivations. 

 

None of that would be a real issue if Roth and Carnahan hadn’t sought that out in the first place. They litter the movie with faux debates over the righteousness of Kersey’s actions, only to vindicate him with a bloody finale designed to, again, make him heroic and justified. Simply put, Roth and Carnahan aren’t smart enough as filmmakers to even begin to have this debate, nowhere near evolved enough to understand what they’re even discussing in the first place. Death Wish would have been a fine popcorn flick had Roth and Carnahan with nothing under its veneer. But they are far away from their element here, and it results in an abysmal, heartless movie.

Review: One out of Five Stars

Click here to see the trailer.

Rating: R

Run time: 107 minutes

Genre: Action

Ask Away

Target audience: Folks with fond memories of the original or people interested in the works of Eli Roth.

Take the whole family?: Nope.

Theater or Netflix?: Just wait for it to stream.

What is up with Eli Roth?: Roth is just not very good at nuance or complexity. There are some major issues with his depiction of race in Death Wish, and he had a similar issue with homophobia in Hostel. He’s solid when he sticks to being weird but simple with Cabin Fever and his great trailer in Grindhouse.

Watch this instead?: The 1974 Death Wish isn't great, but it has the grittiness and an epic stoic performance from Charles Bronson to make it at least somewhat interesting. The later sequels are fascinating if only because of how utterly bonkers they become.