The original “Death Wish” was Hollywood’s attempt to cash in on what had started, with “Billy Jack” and “Walking Tall,” as an outlaw indie-film explosion: violent, low-budget demigod action pulp made outside the industry, with that very fact seen as a measure of its conviction. There’s plenty of blood up on screen, but not much fever to the bloodlust.
DEATH WISH CHARLES BRONSON MOVIE
The truth is that a movie like this one doesn’t matter anymore (the way the Charles Bronson “Death Wish,” though scuzzy and rather listless pulp, did), because even its rabble-rousing feels market-tested. “Death Wish” is designed to ring right-wing alarm bells, but mostly it’s designed to inspire nihilist chuckles at seeing bad-guy scum get killed real good. Each time Willis dispenses another victim-who-deserves-what’s-coming-to-him, the mayhem gets kicked up another bloody, brutal notch.
It’s preaching to the choir - but more than that, it’s a strictly-for-kicks “ideological” thriller, with the structure of a slasher film. In today’s America, where revenge in pop culture has become the air we breathe, it’s doubtful that the new “Death Wish,” even if it’s a modest hit, will be remembered or talked about in a few weeks. Even when they were scurrilous and badly made (which was more or less always), they spoke to the pendulum swings of a nation that had absorbed the counterculture but had yet to shake off the disgruntled passions of the silent majority. cultist might see the new “Death Wish” and think, “Hollywood finally made one for our side.”Įxcept that in the ’70s, revenge thrillers - “Death Wish,” “Walking Tall,” “Billy Jack” - had a gritty resonance that helped sway the body politic. Given that the eternal debate about gun control has now been heightened, post-Parkland massacre, to a new state of urgency, the film, depending on your point of view, is either horribly timed or spectacularly well-timed. It’s an advertisement for gun fetishism, for taking the law into your own hands, for homicide as justice, for thinking of assault weapons as the world’s coolest toys. “Death Wish,” make no mistake, is a movie that has its heart in the wrong place.
(That’s certainly how the multi-racial audience reacted at the preview showing of “Death Wish” I attended they hooted and hollered with glee.) Blowing someone away with unsmiling moral cool is now an act of violent comedy. More than that, the reality of a glib execution like this one is that audiences have been consuming overripe revenge thrillers for 45 years now, and they no longer take them all that seriously.
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