James Wan, the director behind the regrettable Saw, switches from sado-horror to revenge thriller with this adaptation of a novel by Brian Garfield—the man, you may recall, responsible for the literary source of the, um, seminal film Death Wish. Wan still breaks out the gore grossouts, particularly at the film’s climax, in which shotgun blasts literally sever limbs, but he also foolhardily takes the slight genre upgrade as a cue to wax a little more “thoughtful,” always a bad idea if one is incapable of actual thought.
Bacon here plays Nick Hume, a suit at a capital firm who’s a devoted husband and father. After his promising older son is killed by a lowlife for a gang “initiation,” Nick, appalled at the light sentence his boy’s killer is likely to face, refuses to testify against the criminal, and instead takes matters into his own oft-trembling hands. Thus triggering an ultra-bloody war with the gang leader, himself the brother of the slain sleaze.
Most revenge fantasies, in which a lone man does what the putatively pussified criminal justice system can’t, really ought to be based on some recognizable reality, the better to get its audience’s juices flowing. For whatever reason, Wan’s film takes a more ludicrously fanciful view of inner-city crime than even the most mediocre TV cop procedural. Bangers tool around in cherry-condition, souped-up vintage cars—you’d think they raided the vehicle lot for Tarantino’s Death Proof. As harmoniously racially integrated as the cast of The Electric Company, their above-noted majordomo is named Billy Darley—one of those Irish-American gang leaders you hear so much about these days.
But whatever. These guys are evil, and they need wiping out. That Kevin Bacon is no Charles Bronson is, I gather, part of the point, but his character’s varied prevarications and bouts of soul searching, rather than imparting any kind of depth, merely stall Death Sentence from getting on with its filthy work. In one scene Preston, as Bacon’s wife, having learned of his actions, asks him, “Did you think you could balance the equation?” From the seat behind me (I saw the film at a preview screening), I heard a limp, disgusted, “Shut up.” A woman, it was.
Later, after a bloodbath upped the movie’s ante, I heard another expression of audience dissatisfaction: “They only shot him in the side!” “They ain’t real gangstas, yo.” (I swear I’m not making this up. And I feel bad for you poor folks who actually have to go see movies with other people, really.) A little discomfiting to hear from so close, but I kind of knew where they were coming from. Movies such as Death Wish and the original Walking Tall, whatever their moral and aesthetic shortcomings, made truckloads of money because they fed audiences the spectacle of scumbags getting smacked and smoked, and they fed it to ‘em hot and fast and without much in the way of fake reflection. (John Goodman’s greasy, corpulent hood here would have fit into either of those pictures just fine, and I mean that as a compliment.) Wan wants to have something both ways, and in the end, he gets almost nothing. As Clint Eastwood said in yet another genre picture: A man’s gotta know his limitations.
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READ MORE: Director James Wan and star Kevin Bacon Q&A
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