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Vigilante action-thriller Death Wish updates the Charles Bronson franchise, giving us Bruce Willis as Dr. Paul Kersey, a Chicago surgeon and family man saddled with the reverberations of the staggering gun violence that plagues the Windy City. Whereas 1974’s Death Wish director Michael Winner brought filmgoers into a New York City besieged with muggers, robbers, and killers, this 2018 redux finds director Eli Roth guiding a trip around modern day Chi that is made more challenging by technology’s impact on our lives.
Antiheroes like Dr. Kersey are far more common fixtures across film and today’s peak TV landscape than they were in the 1970s and 80s back when Bronson began bucking down bad guys. That’s a key reason that the goods that Roth and his substantial (though underutilized) cast serve here in Death Wish hit you like crime drama-action comfort food for diehard Willis fans. Could play better on small screen over a lazy weekend. But with so much gun violence dominating the news cycles, voices clashing over gun control, your garden variety hoodie now a racially charged symbol of American social dysfunction—and some insisting Roth made an alt-right facist fantasy—Roth’s rendition is bound to be a hard sell on any screen for many.
When crime hits the Kersey home, filmgoers journey with the doctor through the throes of grief, guilt, anger, and an intensifying yearn for revenge, as he struggles with the realization that even the best law enforcement can only do so much protecting and serving.
Notions of gun culture, faith, karma, and street justice surface throughout Death Wish in sometimes darkly comedic ways. The presence of such formidable actors as Dean Norris (Det. Rains) and Kimberley Elise (Det. Jackson)—alums of such culture-shifting, fan favorites as Breaking Bad and Set It Off—spark a hope for tense engagement to pull back more raw layers of Rains and Jackson. Elisabeth Shue and Camila Morrone as wife daughter deliver emotionally as Dr. Kersey’s raison d’etre through sometimes clunky story progression. Vincent D’Onofrio and Mike Epps provide welcome however cursory turns as brother and colleague-friend to doctor and part-time secret vigilante Kersey.
Willis as Kersey gives an iron, stoic exterior, brimming with a boiling, beyond justifiable rage. He’s the doctor charged with saving lives no matter who’s on the operating table on one hand, now strolling the block in a hoodie a la Luke Cage settling scores on the other.
Kersey seethes with disgust for criminals who hurt and take from others, yet is seemingly wrought with an affinity for the power guns provide him to fight back in deadly ways. And how right or wrong Kersey is for taking justice into his own hands is a question that may linger in your mind long after you’ve left the theatre.
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Death Wish starring Bruce Willis hits theaters on March 2, 2018. Visit the film’s official website at DeathWish.movie. Official social hashtag #DeathWishMovie.
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