Movie Review: 'Death Wish'

I went into Eli Roth’s remake of Charles Bronson’s Death Wish expecting to come out angry and ready for a fight. I was expecting to be offended and spend some time writing about the poor timing of a film release that deifies the gun industry just days after the deaths of high school students in Parkland, Florida. I do have some of that righteous indignation built up in my mind but the reality of Death Wish is so boring I can barely stir up the outrage to pan it.

Death Wish 2018 stars Bruce Willis in the role of vigilante Paul Kersey, or should I say Dr. Paul Kersey. Where Bronson played a mild mannered architect, Willis’ Kersey is a doctor who can conveniently treat the wounds inflicted on him as he battles gang members in bad parts of town. Like Bronson’s Kersey, Willis’ version is mobilized toward violence following the murder of his wife and the injuring of his daughter who remains in a coma for most of the movie.

With the police overwhelmed with unsolved murders and no leads to go by, Dr. Kersey sets out to fight crime on his own and ends up going viral as a result. When Dr. Kersey, wearing a hoodie to hide his face, shoots and kills a pair of carjackers, saving the lives of the car owners, his killing spree is caught on a cellphone camera. From there, the vigilante comes to be known as the Angel of Death and his battle against crime leads him back to the men who killed his wife.

I expected Death Wish to offend me and it certainly did offend me but not in the way I expected. I was offended by the incredible tedium of Death Wish. Bruce Willis could not be more checked out than he is as Kersey. Willis’s eyes are remarkably lifeless and his voice is often barely above a whisper as if mustering the breath to speak his lines was more effort than he’s willing to give to this movie.

Willis’ lifeless performance isn’t helped any by Eli Roth’s dull direction. Roth does keep everything in frame but his compositions rarely stand out and the pace of the film is downright leaden. Some of the pacing issues are Willis’ fault, as the film might not be so notably dull if he were trying, but much of the problem belongs to Roth and his attempt to recreate Michael Winner’s take on Death Wish in 1974, a film just as boring as this one.

It is rather astonishing that such a right-wing claptrap as Death Wish became a cult classic. There is nothing to the movie, no drive, no grit, and a performance by Charles Bronson that even Bruce Willis might find to be a little too laid back. The bloody revenge is held to the very end and even then it isn’t a particularly satisfying bit of catharsis. Instead, we get a perfunctory gun fight in which Kersey randomly comes upon his wife’s killers and dispatches them with the help of a friendly cop.

Like its 1974 inspiration, Death Wish 2018 is meant to be subversive; it’s intended to challenge preconceptions about violence and revenge. Instead, what we get is a remarkably dull movie that works best as an advertisement for guns rather than a movie. Indeed, the liveliest part of the movie is an advertisement for a sporting goods store featuring a busty model hocking the latest in advanced weaponry to protect your home.

In this commercial interruption, you can sense a little of the edgy movie that Eli Roth thought he was making. The scene parodies the fetishizing of gun culture while also celebrating it. This scene and indeed the whole of Death Wish 2018 however, is so clumsy that it is hard to tell if Eli Roth is trying to say something or not regarding gun violence. It’s the same cowardly approach that Roth brought to his torture porn Hostel movies, where Roth acted out fantasies of torture on women with only a shallow presentation of violence and zero meaning or wit.

Taking a side is hard, too hard for Eli Roth who bumbles and stumbles his way through this right wing revenge fantasy unable to decide if what he is presenting is a subversive parody of violence or a celebration of violent revenge. Roth wants to have it both ways by being so vague as to not offend either gun owners or those protesting against gun violence. Roth is willing to present Death Wish but lacks the nerve to give the film a point beyond being a minor and forgettable action movie.

In the end however, even the wishy washy cop out of the story of Death Wish 2018 is not the film’s biggest flaw. The real flaw is that no one in the movie gives a damn. Bruce Willis is barely awake for most of the movie. I kid you not, Willis may be even more checked out in this performance than he was when he picked up that multi-million dollar check for six minutes of work in The Expendables.

Is Death Wish 2018 better or worse than the original? It’s hard to say. The original was pretty boring in its own right with Bronson nearly as somnambulant as Willis is in the new version. Both films want to be subversive, and the first film seems more willing to embrace right wing fantasy than the 2018 version but whether that can be seen as a good thing is questionable. In the end I wouldn’t recommend either version of Death Wish.