Review| Death Wish

I have to give Eli Roth a lot of credit. It takes some serious chutzpah to remake a movie like Death Wish in the current cultural climate. After the tragic mass shooting in Florida brought gun control back to the forefront, I’m honestly surprised that MGM still wanted to release it. That being said, the movie is definitely getting more of a bad rap than it deserves. Most critics are reviewing this movie through a politically-skewed lens.

Released in 1974, the original Death Wish was a morally ambiguous political and social statement of its time. The story of a mild-mannered man gunning down criminals in the streets was a cathartic release for the American public, which was fed up with the day’s high urban crime rate, especially in places like New York City. It was a cynical movie that was ripe for the cynical 1970s. Seeing the film fairly recently for the first time, I expected it to be a rousing action film and it ended up being a disturbing look at one man’s downward spiral into vengeance and murder.

Though it shares its name and basic plot points with the classic 1974 original, this remake, with Bruce Willis standing in for Charles Bronson, is an almost entirely different Death Wish – which is good, bad, and peculiar. It’s entertaining and somewhat profound, and the context of today’s world gives it a resonance that hits home in several places. However, the film eventually loses focus and has trouble deciding what kind of film it wants to be.

SPOILERS AHEAD

The Good: Eli Roth Surprises Me

I’m normally not a fan of director Eli Roth’s work. He’s mostly known as a horror director who spends way too much time on intricate, creative, ironic and graphic ways to torture human beings. But his turn as an action director here is actually very good. The action set pieces are smooth and well-shot with not a lot of shaky-cam. He’s also very good at building suspense, such as in the home invasion scene at the beginning of the film.

Bruce Willis’ Paul Kersey worked for the most part (read on in the next section for more). His subdued and mild-mannered personality was believable and very sympathetic. Perhaps Willis was phoning it in? Maybe. But it made his turn into the vigilante “Grim Reaper” much more intense. Making Kersey a surgeon instead of an architect is an inspired bit of irony – a man who is charged with saving lives takes them outside the hospital.

The Bad: A Different Death Wish

The biggest flaw of Death Wish was its tone. Eli Roth couldn’t seem to decide what kind of movie he wanted to make. This lead to frustrating conflicts in logic within the narrative as well as the characters.

Was Death Wish supposed to be a real-world parable? The film seemed to start out that way. The possibility of a Paul Kersey-type killing criminals in 2018 is an intriguing notion, and Eli Roth said as such in interviews for this film. However, the finished product barely touches on the real-world societal consequences of a vigilante. The story isn’t about the larger crime wave in Chicago; it’s about this one man’s quest to find and kill the murderers of his wife, period. This Death Wish has more in common with Taken than the 1974 original. Willis’ crusade is focused and the few instances of random vigilantism are almost an afterthought.

So that got me thinking of the film as a satire. The aforementioned gun store that Paul Kersey went into was an eye-rolling caricature of American gun culture – even spouting the boring, cartoonish platitudes in a television commercial that gun-grabbers often lament and lampoon. But this was the only aspect of the film that contained any hint of political dark comedy, so probably not a satire.

Finally, there were several horrific set pieces that seemed to point to the possibility of Death Wish being a pseudo-horror/suspense film. The scene where Kersey sliced up one of his wife assailants pointed to that theory. There was one another scene involving a bowling ball that rolled off a ledge at just the right time that was absolutely silly. These scenes seemed too over-the-top and really stood out in the film’s established, realistic setting – taking me out of the film.

The final shot puts a great, big capstone on the film’s wildly inconsistent character tone. After Kersey dispensed with the last of the criminals who killed his wife (with that hidden automatic weapon mentioned above), he promised the police that his days of vigilante justice are over, which makes sense. The police were satisfied and everything seemed to be getting back to normal. Then, as Kersey’s daughter went to college, he spied a petty thief and gave him a “finger gun,” with AC/DC’s “Back in Black” playing over credits. Wait…what?

This is an obvious homage to the original film (which ended in a similar way), but it just did not work in the new film’s context. Bronson’s Kersey was still very much set on killing criminals and the police knew it (they even forced Kersey to move away from New York so that he wouldn’t be their problem anymore). It made sense that Bronson would give some thugs the finger gun because that was an extension of his expressed motivation. But Willis’ Kersey has no reason to do so, and his focused quest attests to that.

Protection and Vengeance

Death Wish‘s muddled tone often obfuscates its themes. At its core, Death Wish is a thematic struggle between two conflicting ideas. One is a noble and biblical principle. The other, a fleshly desire that is sinful and unlawful. These two ideas must not be conflated, though often times they are by opportunistic politicians.

“If a man really wants to protect what’s his, he has to do it for himself.” Paul Kersey’s father-in-law

When his wife was murdered and daughter incapacitated, Paul Kersey’s first instinct, aside from blaming the thugs who did it, was to blame himself. “I should have been there to protect them,” he said. Kersey echoed a biblical truth about men as the protectors of their families. Men are, by and large, stronger than their wives and children, and are therefore called to protect them from harm. It’s one of the reasons why the Founding Fathers of the United States enshrined a right to keep firearms in his home in the Constitution: to protect what he holds dear.

In the Book of Ephesians, the apostle Paul tells husbands to “love their wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her…” Husbands are to be like Christ in that Christ loved us so much to die for us. In this way, men are expected, if necessary, to die for their family in their defense. Christ Himself said that “greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.”

“A vigilante is just a man lost in the scramble for his own gratification…” Ra’s al Ghul, Batman Begins

Where Paul Kersey went wrong was his reaction to the pain and guilt he felt. He became a vigilante, seeking revenge against those who hurt his family, and by extension, the toxic society that bred those criminals. Revenge fantasies like Death Wish play into our desire for justice in an unjust world. We want to take control of our situation and right wrongs in a way we deem to be just. This is an understandable feeling, but vengeance is not ours to take.

“Do not repay evil with evil…Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord.” Romans 12:17 & 19

We are imperfect beings and cannot enact perfect justice. Only God is fit to judge those who sin, as He is the supreme Judge and Lawgiver. We must have faith that the Lord will judge those who have done terrible things. Human vengeance is a finite thing, but God’s judgment and wrath are eternal and deserved.

Aren’t we glad, then, that God saw fit to forgive us for the retribution we so deserved from our sin against Him?

Final Thoughts

I enjoyed this Death Wish remake, more or less. It’s entertaining enough, with some interesting action set pieces and genuinely suspenseful scenes. There’s a touch of social commentary that I wish could have been elaborated upon. But the film eventually loses focus, making the audience wonder what they should feel at any given point.

As Paul Kersey’s story demonstrated, revenge isn’t good for the soul. It turns the most mild-mannered of men into monsters. It’s an empty, selfish endeavor that will not provide what was intended: making us whole again. Only God can heal us from tragedy and dispense the ultimate justice on evildoers. It is not our place to enact vengeance. God’s justice is perfect and eternal.