Death Wish was released in 2018 and stars Bruce Willis, Vincent D'Onofrio and Elisabeth Shue.
When a group of thugs break into his house, murder his wife and leave his daughter in a coma, Dr Paul Kersey, played by Willis, decides to take matters into his own hands and becomes a vigilante, roaming the streets of Chicago during the night looking for thugs and criminals to kill.
This is a remake of the 1974 film of the same name starring Charles Bronson.
Now, I'm not a fan of remakes at all and this film only goes to enhance my hatred of shoddy and unnecessary remakes.
This film is dreadful! It's such an awfully paced action-thriller, and what makes it even more annoying and ridiculous is the constant scenes of radio shows, internet vox pops and podcasts giving needless exposition.
It feels like the director Eli Roth knew he didn't have a good enough screenplay and just added Youtube clips of people talking about gun crime to give the movie some weight, it didn't!
The performances are seriously bad, they are so wooden, especially Bruce Willis.
In the original movie, the character Paul Kersey is an architect living in New York, who's wife and daughter are attacked by thugs. His wife dies and his daughter is left catatonic and in hospital. What follows is a really good revenge movie. Kersey is a desperate man who sets out looking for those responsible for what happened and becomes a reluctant vigilante, even throwing up when he shoots his first mugger. Charles Bronson played Kersey really well. It was well directed, the story and action scenes flowed well and it was a good movie.
This remake has Kersey as a surgeon, presumably so that he can come into contact with shooting victims giving him a reason to go about killing criminals. Some of the death scenes were so over the top it actually made them funny, one, in particular, could have come straight out of a cartoon, after a fight a bad guy points his gun at Kersey, only for a bowling ball to fall on his head having been dislodged, which made the guy fall down and accidentally shoot himself. I actually laughed. This is just a boring 'revenge' drama. There isn't a single memorable action scene with a very boring lead character, dreadful acting and not even a proper villain. It could have been an acceptable action film but they ruined it by trying to hard to make it a 'drama' and to have a message.
This film was released in 2018 and I genuinely feel that Roth made this movie to have a message about gun crime, especially with what was going on in the USA at the time, hence the stupid interjections of radio show hosts and podcast host giving their opinions on gun violence, this only slowed the pace of the film down.
If he was trying to make a thrilling action film about a suffering man who turns to vigilante justice, he failed!
Review of Death Wish
