I went into Death Wish expecting a laugh a minute, but the movie was never meant to be a joke. In fact, the film is as earnest as it is clumsy, and it’s plenty clumsy. It has heart. And if you squint hard enough, it might even have a point or two worth listening to.
There are quite a few similarities between this movie and Rambo and Rocky. Death Wish carves out a high water mark that its sequels fail entirely to reach, and does a decent enough job of capturing the spirit of its time. The film even has a certain cultural cache, as do the two Stallone vehicles. One major difference however, which should not be overlooked, is that Rambo and Rocky are better in almost every way.
The plot of Death Wish is straightforward enough to make the average Troma film seem labyrinthine. Charles Bronson plays a mild-mannered conscientious objector of an architect who lives in New York City. His wife and daughter are attacked and brutalized by a trio of vicious, animalistic thugs while he is at work, and he goes a little insane. He repaints his living room a ghastly color and proceeds to walk around New York shooting vicious thugs. The media turns him into a modern-day folk hero, and aside from reducing the crime rate and empowering the average citizen, he begins to make the powers-that-be nervous that they might lose control.
Unintentionally comic badguys.
The only detour the movie makes occurs shortly after the death of Bronson’s wife, when his boss sends him out to work on a development project in Tucson, AZ. The visit to the country is one of revitalization and recentering, and while it does serve to further the plot a smidge, its primary purpose is symbolic and metaphorical. Every part of the movie but particularly this section creates a dichotomy between the city and the country. The civilized and the frontier. The cowardly present, and the self-reliant bedrock on which America was built.
During this section we have numerous scenes of Very Important Dialog. There is also a mock old-west style gunfight in a tourist trap that proves formative for Bronson, and a scene in which he communes with nature. Towards the end, Bronson takes a trip to the gun range with the cowboy hick (warrior poet) developer who gives him the pistol he uses throughout his vigilante rampage.
The city and the country, embodied here as opposites.
Sometimes I’m tempted to make excuses for movies because of their age, but don’t be fooled. Plenty of Death Wish’s contemporaries are not just good but excellent. A short list might include Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Harold and Maude (1971), The Godfather (1972), Chinatown (1974), and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975). In fact, Taxi Driver (1976) is one of the best movies of the decade, and it examines many of the same themes as Death Wish.
Never forget that there are plenty of better movies out there. But if you want to go slumming, you could do worse. Don’t expect the world when you rent it, and you won’t be disappointed.
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Do you think this compares to BLACK SHEEP, the New Zealand film about zombified, mutant vigilante sheep?