So I finally got the ability to watch movies in theaters again, so what did I see tonight? The only movie that had a showing late enough for me to see after getting off work, Death Wish. I’d only seen the original Death Wish 1-3 once, and was pretty interested to see how the over the over the top action revenge movie would be interpreted, especially with the strong social shift on gun violence, and gun control regulations that have occurred lately, along with sentiments about policing. This new Death Wish was more of a ride than I expected, and has a lot more to discuss than I thought.
Honestly when I came into this, I thought I would talk about the action scenes, the cinematography, Bruce Willis’ acting, but instead, I find myself wanting to talk much more about the subtext of the movie, as that’s what I actually found to be most interesting.
Some of the interesting scenes were the ones where the guns weren’t firing, but instead, being sold. A lovely girl “Bethany”, first appears to our main character, Dr. Kersey (played by Bruce Willis), in a cheap online ad for a “sporting goods store” that does not advertise using the weapons that they proffer for sport, but rather as tools to kill “bad guys”, even using heavily fear-based language, including that bad guys won’t wait for police to arrive, along with showing the response time of a gun (3 seconds it says, and even flashes on the screen), versus the time that police would take to arrive, saying how thinly veiled the purpose of the weapons being sold is. When Dr. Kersey first arrives in the gun shop, the same girl for the commercial guides him through the store, and shows the large variety of weapons available. It’s certainly notable in this scene the types of weapons that are primarily shown are military-styled weapons. A lot of semi-automatic weapons, nothing that would resemble a hunting rifle. Pistols are shown, but there are few of them, and many that are shown have extended clips, or accessories that would move them from weapons of sport into killing tools. Of course, the question comes up, “how hard is it to get any of these things?” to which our dear tour guide informs us that it is quite simple to get a weapon, only taking a few days, and that the licensing requirements are lax, with everyone who attempts the gun safety course, for example, easily passing. Even the dialogue in person betrays the intention of the gun purchaser, and the store has people other than the characters being focused on in nearly every shot. It’s pretty easy to see that the fear the movie almost parodies it says, works on the common people. Our “hero” rejects purchasing anything then, and is fortunate enough to stumble head-first into a .45 Glock dropped by a patient who dies during a surgery.
The other thing that bothered me in the movie was the way that Dr. Kersey interacts with the police. In the beginning of the movie, we see our good doctor first fail to save a police officer, then go to save the person who shot said officer. He says that he will do his best to save the shooter’s life, even after that man caused the death of an officer. This lines up pretty nicely with the Hippocratic oath, and with the strong moral character one might expect to see in a doctor. Later, when he interacts with the police, the police are shown as sympathetic to the doctor, but overall ineffectual. Even as Dr. Kersey sloppily leaves behind clues for the police that should lead them to arresting him for at least some of the people that he kills. Instead, he interacts with the police coolly, and even once he’s suspected, he is able to simply avoid the police until his vengeance has been completed. Even once Kersey has finished, the detectives who are supposed to be investigating even give a nod to him as the killer, with thinly veiled language, almost like a parent telling a child that it’s okay, as long as he doesn’t do it again.
The cavalier way that the vigilante killings are treated, and specifically separated and delineated from the typical waves of violence in the movie, brings attention to an important factor of this movie, that being, the killer is white. I tried to imagine this movie with someone else in the role, perhaps someone who didn’t look quite as tired as Bruce Willis in this movie, perhaps a Samuel L. Jackson in the role, and came to the stark conclusion that this movie wouldn’t work in that case. The interactions with the police, the gun shop scenes, they all would have been significantly different had the protagonist been black, the movie would have gone from a little bit of suspension of disbelief, to an unearthly realm of imagining. However, I believe that this choice was intentional. I believe that the movie is in a way, parodying itself, and subtly pointing out these blaring differences in reality.
Overall I think that the movie was not quite over-the-top enough to put it into any memorable category, though it was somewhat fun to sit through, and did have some good, well-shot action scenes, as well as a torture scene. Overall, I’d give the movie a 5.5 out of 10. To me, it was worth watching once, but if I really want a fun action movie, I think I’ll stick to Charles Bronson’s mail-order machine gun.
/rant 