Guilty Pleasure No. 37: Death Wish (dir by Eli Roth)

Posted on August 7, 2018 by Lisa Marie Bowman

Is it finally safe to honestly review Death Wish?

You may remember that this film, a remake of the 70s vigilante classic, came out last March and critics literally went insane attacking it. That it got negative reviews wasn’t necessarily a shock because the movie was directed by Eli Roth and he’s never been a favorite of mainstream critics. Still, it was hard not to be taken aback but just how enraged the majority of the critics appeared to be. Seriously, from the reviews, you would have thought that Death Wish was not just a bad movie but a crime against nature.

Of course, a lot of that was due to the timing of the film’s release. The film was released less than a month after the shootings at Stoneman Douglas High School in Florida. At the time the film first came out, the country was in the midst of a daily diet of anti-second amendment rallies and David Hogg. Many critics accused Death Wish of being a commercial for the NRA. Others branded the film as being right-wing propaganda. In fact, the criticism was so harsh that it was hard not to feel that the critics were essentially taking Death Wish far more seriously than it took itself.

If anything, Death Wish is a big, glossy, and rather silly movie. Bruce Willis stars as Dr. Paul Kersey. Paul is a peace-loving man. We know this because he refuses to get into a fight with a belligerent parent at a soccer game. He’s also an emergency room doctor, the type who pronounces a policeman dead and then rushes off to try to save the life of whoever shot him. No one in the movie suspects that Paul would ever become a vigilante but we know that there’s no way he can’t eventually end up walking the streets with a loaded gun because he’s played by Bruce Willis. When Paul backs down from the fight at the soccer game, Willis delivers his dialogue with so much self-loathing that we just know that, once Paul gets back home, he’s going to lock himself in the basement and start yelling at the walls, Stepfather-style.

Eventually, criminals break into Paul’s house and shoot both his wife (Elisabeth Shue) and his daughter (Camila Morrone). His wife dies. His daughter ends up in a coma. Paul spends a day or two in shock and then he promptly gets a gun and starts shooting criminals. Eventually, this brings him into conflict with the same criminals who attacked his family! Meanwhile, two detectives (Dean Norris and Kimberly Elise) look at all the dead bodies piling up around them and just shrug it off. At one crime scene, Norris is happy to grab a slice of pizza.

And really, that’s it. It sounds simple because it is simple. There is absolutely no narrative complexity to be found in Death Wish, which is why, in its own cheerfully crude way, the film totally works. In real life, of course, vigilante justice is not the solution and the death penalty is often unfairly applied but, from the moment the opening titles splash across the screen, Death Wish makes clear that it has no interest in real-life and, throughout its brisk running time, it literally seems to be ridiculing anyone in the audience who might be worried about the moral ramifications of a citizen gunning down a drug dealer.

Death Wish is a big extravagant comic book. It takes Paul one scene to go from being a meek doctor to being an expert marksman and, when Paul dispatches one criminal by dropping a car on him, Roth lays on the gore so thick that he almost seems to be daring us to take his film seriously. By that same token, Paul kills a lot of people but at least they’re all really, really bad. In fact, the criminals are so evil that you can’t help but suspect that Roth is poking a little bit of fun at the conventions of the vigilante genre. Even the fact that Willis wanders through the entire film with the same grim expression on his face feels like an inside joke between the director and his audience.

The critics were right when they called Death Wish a fantasy but they were wrong to frame that as somehow being a flaw. It’s a cartoonishly violent and deeply silly film and yet, at the same time it’s impossible not to cheer a little when Paul reveals that he’s been hiding a machine gun under his coffee table. It’s an effective film. Eli Roth delivers exactly what you would expect from a film about Bruce Willis killing criminals in Chicago. It may not be a great film but it works.