Tellingly, to support this character choice and underline it as a thesis, some of Wan's most formally stylish-but-brutish set pieces, including a oner in a parking garage, are founded not on carefully choreographed explosions of violence but on the sweaty, struggling, soul-sucking moments in between.
Bacon understands the "descending into madness" part of the assignment, and is more than prepared to show Nick's floundering in all its unflattering glory. As his Nick Hume runs, fights, and shoots his way through the criminals he's attempting to pay back, Bacon's face contorts into wild expressions of fear, a kind of purposeful, controlled representation of Nick's complete lack of control. Unlike Bronson's "badass stoicism" in the Death Wish franchise, Bacon's take on his character's slide into mayhem is marked by physical exertion, even exaggeration. And so does his star, Kevin Bacon, willing to shave away his ego at just about every point of the picture.
Wan, who was just coming off of accidentally kick-starting a lurid sub-genre of mass cinema featuring elements he was intending to comment on rather than luxuriate in, knows how contemptible his main character is. RELATED: New 'Malignant' Poster Channels the Giallo Influence in James Wan's New Horror Film And this time around, the psychological, self-loathing ramifications of vengeance were explored in exacting, harrowing, grimy detail. As an act of "penance," Garfield wrote a new novel, a sequel to Death Wish called Death Sentence, a book that more explicitly examined the horrific toll of violent revenge.ģ2 years after that novel was published, in 2007, James Wan directed a film adaptation, while not directly setting it in the Bronson film universe. He wanted to explore the idea "that vigilantism is an attractive fantasy, but it only makes things worse in reality." Instead, thanks to changes insisted upon by producers, the film goes right up to the edge of arguing that vigilantism, that "an ordinary guy who descends into madness" is good. He meant for his work to be a critique, not a celebration, of all these horrific impulses. The middle-to-upper-class man being invaded by lower-class "thugs" the "thugs" in question being non-white the point of invasion being the female body which "belongs to" and "motivates" the man - these are the icky feelings and philosophies splattered across the screen in Death Wish, representing a worrying anchor in the midst of changing seas, setting up the lane for countless other films in its wake.īrian Garfield, the author of the Death Wish novel the film is based on, didn't like this. Inspiring a multi-film franchise, including a 2018 Eli Roth remake starring Bruce Willis, Death Wish queasily poked at the anxieties gurgling in the belly of a certain type of white American male, offering them a particularly explosive, borderline fetishistic form of cinematic wish fulfillment. Starring Charles Bronson, the film's plot is simple: A man's wife is killed and his daughter sexually assaulted by criminals, and he takes the law into his own hands to punish them violently. From ancient Greek plays to William Shakespeare to Ingmar Bergman, the idea of "someone doing something wrong to me so I do something wrong to them" is wrought with primal power, pervasive in the most influential, high-falutin', and well-regarded pieces of art and storytelling.īut as a subgenre of mass, lurid, trashy cinema, the "vengeance thriller" reached a particularly calcified blueprint in 1974's Death Wish. Revenge as a story engine is nothing new.