James Wan’s ‘Death Sentence’ Remains the Best ‘Death Wish’ Movie
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Even Brian Garfield, the author of the 1972 novel that soon became the Charles Bronson-starring Death Wish, has gone on record as stating that Death Sentence, the 2007 (loose) adaptation of his own Death Wish sequel, more effectively captured the themes present in his tales of vigilante justice than any of the Death Wish films managed to. And after seeing Eli Roth’s remake of Michael Winner’s 1974 original, released into theaters this weekend, we’ve got a strong feeling Garfield’s stance won’t be changing.
Bruce Willis, as he’s apt to do, sleepwalks through Death Wish, a tone-deaf remake that sure doesn’t denounce vigilante justice as a viable means of protecting one’s family and/or one’s city. In fact, it likens street justice to a form of therapy, essentially relieving Willis’ Paul Kersey of the emptiness he feels in the wake of his wife’s murder. Mind you, the original Death Wish had a similarly pro-vigilante slant, but Roth’s remake – especially given the poor timing of its release – is particularly problematic in that regard.
AC/DC’s “Back in Black” plays loudly over a scene wherein Kersey cleans and assembles his first gun, making it clear that the film’s stance is that vigilante justice is pretty cool; around the same point in the original, for the sake of comparison, Bronson’s Kersey is vomiting into a toilet in the wake of pumping a bullet into a criminal for the first time.
James Wan’s Death Sentence takes the denouncement of vigilante justice one step further, firmly establishing that Kevin Bacon’s Nick Hume is very much not a man just waiting to spring into action as a pistol-packing hero, but rather an ordinary father/husband who by all means should’ve gone his entire life without so much as even touching a gun. But when Hume’s oldest son is taken from him in a brutal gang initiation at a gas station, he makes a decision that it’s immediately clear he’ll never be coming back from. Hume kills his son’s murderer with a knife to the stomach, plunging himself headlong into a terrifying world he has no business being in. The price he pays, well, it’s severe and ultimate.
What sets Death Sentence apart from most man-becomes-vigilante films is that Hume, unlike either version of Kersey that we’ve seen on the big screen, isn’t instantly transformed into a vigilante badass in the wake of his son’s murder. In fact, much of the film actually centers on the gang’s revenge on Hume for what he’s done to their friend, rather than the other way around. Hume’s ill-conceived plan was only to kill his son’s murderer, but doing so puts him firmly in the cross-hairs of the gang the young man belonged to. This quickly leads to the film’s most intense sequence, wherein Hume is chased to and around a parking garage that becomes the setting of his second murder.
With the gang now determined to wipe Hume out of existence for what he’s done, they eventually end up breaking into his home, wherein the film starts to feel much more familiar to fans of the Charles Bronson Death Wish movies. The gang, led by Garrett Hedlund’s Billy Darley, unknowingly turns Nick Hume into their worst nightmare, killing his wife and putting his young son into a coma. In the final act, Hume, with a crudely-shaved head so you know he means business, goes on a guns-blazing rampage. He’s got nothing left to lose, and he takes the fight straight to the Darley gang’s door, unloading various different firearms until he’s pretty sure there’s not a pulse left in the place.
This brutal, barbaric act of revenge doesn’t bring Hume any real peace, nor does he get to continue his life in the wake of it. Instead, Hume ends up seated on a couch right next to Darley, bleeding to death alongside one another. The line between murderer and vigilante hero has completely vanished, echoed by Billy’s final line to Nick.
“Look at you. You look like one of us. Look what I made you.”
Pale as a ghost, blood pouring from a bullet wound in his neck, and his head literally stapled together, Nick Hume has become a completely different person than he was when the film started. A once-happy family man with a good job has been turned into an unrecognizable killing machine; not by the actions of the men who took his son from him, but more by his own decision to exact revenge on them. That thirst for blood got Hume’s wife killed, and it also ultimately leads to his own death in the film’s heartbreaking final moments.
Compare this to the final moments of both versions of Death Wish, wherein Paul Kersey coolly continues his life of crime unscathed, and you see why Brian Garfield called James Wan’s first foray outside the horror genre, “a stunningly good movie,” adding that it effectively depicts the loss of Nick’s humanity and “the stupidity of vengeful vigilantism.”
Wan’s Death Sentence, no doubt in large part thanks to a well-cast Kevin Bacon’s performance (not to mention John Goodman in a fun supporting role as an underground arms dealer), is packed with genuine emotion; it’s a film that doesn’t shy away from exploitation-style violence but one that also makes sure to never lose sight of its lead character’s humanity – both his initial struggle to retain it, and his eventual self-destruction of every last shred of it. Nick Hume is not the hero of this story. His is the tragic tale of a man who makes one wrong move and is never able to return from it. Contrary to the character he’s based on, he’s the poster child for vigilante justice being a really, really bad idea.
In hindsight, Death Sentence was the only Death Wish remake we needed.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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