Death Wish

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A break in leaves Dr. Paul Kersey’s (played by Bruce Willis) wife dead and his daughter in a coma. When the police investigation seems to be going nowhere, Paul decides to take the law into his own hands. This is a familiar story, but it’s one I typically enjoy. Now, I will admit that I haven’t seen the original Death Wish yet. But, I am very much so familiar with the vigilante revenge story. I am somebody who will admit to liking Peppermint, Death Sentence, and the 2004 Punisher film. As you can imagine, I liked this film too. Part of it could be the fact that the Eli Roth-isms—everybody has to be an unlikable dick—is very minimal. There’s one guy near the beginning of the film that sort of resembles this. One of the biggest disappointments I had with this movie was the fact that this character that Paul had issues with never came back into play at all. All it told me was that this character truly served no purpose whatsoever. On the other hand, it makes sense to me when Roth has the villains act like this. The villains come off as though they are designed to be hated. Beau Knapp as Knox (the leader of the gang that killed Kersey’s wife) has just the right level of sleaze and menace in his delivery. This is done to a point where I kind of wish he was the main villain for the movie’s entire running time instead of the film’s last half hour. In the very beginning of the film, I was worried about Bruce Willis’s performance in the film. Initially, it seemed like this would be another paycheck role for him where he was just going to sleep through the whole thing. Thankfully, the whole movie wasn’t like that. He does manage to give some emotion to his performance when he absolutely needs to. While I don’t mind the action scenes in this movie, many of them feel sort of standard—to a point where I didn’t have that much of a reaction to the visceral feeling the violence was clearly going for. Overall, I really enjoyed Death Wish as a good enough vigilante action movie. I can’t say it’s the absolute best example of the genre, nor can I say it’s the absolute worst. 

6 / 10