BEFORE: You may sometimes get the feeling that this week is just like last week, only with different people or slightly different events. For example, there could be a Democratic National Convention last week and a Republican National Convention this week. Same thing, sort of, only with different people, and vastly different ideology. Last week I watched "Captive State", "The Ballad of Lefty Brown" and "The Equalizer 2" - a sci-fi film, a Western and a vigilante action film - and this week it's "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets", "The Kid" and "Death Wish". Same as before, only different somehow. And would you believe last week I watched "The Gambler" and tomorrow's film is (sort of) about gambling?
Vincent D'Onofrio carries over from "The Kid".
THE PLOT: Dr. Paul Kersey is an experienced trauma surgeon, a man who has spent his life saving lives. After an attack on his family, Paul embarks on his own mission for justice.
AFTER: Throughout this year's lockdown, in addition to my steady diet of movies, I've had a chance to catch up on some bingeable TV shows, too. I started with "The Tiger King" because back in April everybody was buzzing about it, and then I spent a couple months watching the entire run of "Arrested Development", even the confusingly re-edited fourth season - and if it was hard to understand in its re-edited form, I hesitate to even think about how confusing it was before. I'm still working my way through "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee", because I was also very late coming to THAT party. But I also took the time to watch a few true crime series, the first was "McMillions", about the fraud that took place over the years in the McDonald's (rigged) Monopoly giveaways - yep, the FBI devoted itself to proving that a fast food chain's system of awarding prizes to its customers was anything but fair. Instead, people at the security firm hired to make sure the game was fair ended up giving the biggest prizes to his friends and relatives, keeping the biggest cuts of those prizes for himself.
But lately I've turned to more gruesome crime-based TV, like the 6-part series "I'll Be Gone in the Dark", about the efforts to track down California's Golden State Killer, and also "Helter Skelter: An American Myth", which is covering all aspects of the Manson Family killings. Just 1 episode to go. But watching all of those events in documentaries, along with the fictional events depicted in "Death Wish" has had a cumulative effect on me - let's just say I'm likely to not go to bed until the sun comes up, or perhaps I'll fall asleep in the recliner in the living room with the lights on, just in case the killer is outside or across the street, waiting for his opportunity to break in after the lights go out and before the sun comes up. I feel like I must remain vigilant.
Now I also have to worry about somebody getting our home address from the valet parking stations at the fancy restaurants we go to, and putting a crew together to break in and rob the valuables in our safe. Wait a second, we don't have a safe, or many valuables for that matter, and we haven't been to a fancy restaurant with valet parking in many months. In fact we've only driven to three restaurants in the last couple months, and all were outdoor dining, so there's little risk. Even if somebody broke in, they wouldn't find much to rob, unless they stumbled on my comic book collection - and even then, most of the really valuable ones are in my off-site storage locker. The only other notable things of value we have are our electronics, and it's hard to steal a big-screen TV or a heavy computer, right?
Paul Kersey in "Death Wish", however, was in much more danger - huge suburban home, watches, jewelry, a deadbeat brother who he slips a couple of grand to every now and then, plus a daughter heading off to NYU in the fall. Hey, a well-respected trauma surgeon should enjoy some of the finer things in life, right? So he's marked for a home robbery by that parking valet, who gets the home address from the car's navigation system. The robbers at least had the common courtesy to schedule the home invasion when they thought the family would be out at another restaurant, so, really, the blame here falls on fate, since Paul gets called to work at the hospital and the dinner plans get cancelled, which meant Paul's wife and daughter arrived home while the thieves were still in the house. To their credit, they tried to fight back against the thieves, but you know, they had guns, so it did not end well.
The film then follows the mentality of the NRA, in that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is to be a good guy with a gun. Well, to be honest, it's too late to "stop" the crime, so the only way to get revenge on a bad guy with a gun is for him to become a good guy with a gun. There's a steep learning curve, to be sure, in becoming a vigilante, but once he gets some target practice in, and finds his inner tough guy, Kersey starts leading a dual life - respected surgeon saving lives by day, and vigilante killer taking them away by night. You can almost justify this as balancing the scales somehow, theoretically if he kept this up long enough then all the good people would be alive and all the bad people would be dead - but what about himself, would he then be a good person or a bad person? It's tough to say, because I'm just coming off "The Kid" which displayed a similar dichotomy with Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, both men had killed people. But yesterday's film suggested that it's what you do AFTER you kill somebody that makes the difference, do you admit your crime and turn yourself in, or run away and hide?
Kersey's sort of caught in the middle here, opting for neither tactic. He doesn't run and hide, but neither does he turn himself in as the "Angel of Death" who's taken down a notorious drug-dealer and a couple of carjackers. Then he starts working his way up the chain to find his wife's killers, catching a break when that parking valet turns up on his operating table. He unlocks the valet's phone and finds information about the contact who fences the stolen goods, then pays him a visit to get his watch back, and learn the names of the crew members who robbed his house. Meanwhile he's also juggling his day job at the hospital, caring for his comatose daughter, and learning how to clean guns, hack phones and destroy hard drives from YouTube videos. When does this guy sleep? Oh, right, he really doesn't.
Finally there's only one killer left, Kersey shoots him in a nightclub but doesn't kill him, so he turns up at the hospital. I suppose it would have been too easy to have Kersey in charge of his surgery, because then he could have just botched that, problem solved. Instead the last guy is someone else's patient, but he recognizes the doctor, and the doctor recognizes him, so it's only a matter of time before he shows up (again) at the doctor's house. Only this time, the doctor's ready for him with a few new tricks bought at the gun store.
The first version of this film was released in 1974, starring Charles Bronson as an architect who becomes a vigilante, and it was set in New York, which had a very high murder rate at that time. The remake was originally developed to star Sylvester Stallone as a cop, but over time Stallone left the project, and the next director, Eli Roth, re-worked the film to feature Bruce Willis as a surgeon in Chicago, which now has a higher murder rate than NYC, I think.. It kind of all worked out for the best - Bronson appeared in four sequels to the original "Death Wish", they could at least make one more with Willis, and they kind of teased that at the end, with Kersey moving to NYC to be near his daughter at NYU.
I would like to get really behind this film, but it comes just a little too close to making the argument that if you have a gun, you get to decide what's right and wrong, who lives and who dies. That goes just a little beyond the NRA mentality of buying guns to protect your home and family, and more into the territory of thought where if you're well-armed, you can make your way into your city's underworld and just kill everyone you determine to be a "bad person". And once you start making decisions about who deserves to die, I'm guessing it might be hard to stop.
Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Shine a Light"), Elisabeth Shue (last seen in "Battle of the Sexes"), Dean Norris (last seen in "How Do You Know"), Beau Knapp (last seen in "Destroyer"), Kimberly Elise (last seen in "Ad Astra"), Stephanie Janusauskas, Camila Morrone, Jack Kesy (last seen in "Baywatch"), Ronnie Gene Blevins (last seen in "Joe"), Len Cariou (last seen in "Spotlight"), Kirby Bliss Blanton (last seen in "Project X"), Wendy Crewson (last seen in "On the Basis of Sex"), Ian Matthews (last seen in "Stockholm"), Luis Oliva (last seen in "Mother!"), Moe Jeudy-Lamour, Stephen McHattie (last seen in "Born to Be Blue"), Erich "Mancow" Muller, with a cameo from Mike Epps (last seen in "Supercon").
RATING: 6 out of 10 cans of brake fluid
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