Eight years after the his first wave of vigilante murders, Chuck
Bronson is back as architect-turned-vigilante Paul Kersey, slaughtering
more depraved street thugs. The police couldn't figure out who might have
been responsible. Should they have? Well, let's see. Right after Kersey's
wife was killed and his daughter raped, there was a wave of killings in
New York and every person in The Big Apple knew Kersey was the killer. I
think they even held a ticker-tape parade for him and presented him with
the key to the city. Then, immediately after Kersey's beloved housekeeper
was raped and killed, and his daughter died after being raped yet again,
another killing spree started. No, I guess there's nothing really
suspicious there. After all, the second series of slayings occurred in
L.A.
The Death Wish films have often been criticized for treating violence,
especially rape, as graphically sensational entertainment. I suppose there
is some truth to that. In portraying the rape scenes through the rapists'
eyes, the director invites us to share their anger and lust, and the
camera dares us to look away from the innocent naked flesh of the victims.
Is that good filmmaking or bad? I guess it depends on your point of view.
The early Death Wish films succeeded in getting audiences deeply involved.
Perhaps they achieved this success with blunt and lurid techniques, and
perhaps one may argue that to do so is both dishonest and artless, but one
can not deny that it worked. Why was it effective? Because the formula
left us no room for doubt, nuance or hesitation. There is no possible
sympathy for Bronson's victims, nor condemnation of his disrespect for the
law. There are no shades of gray. The one thing you will not see in the
Death Wish movies is subtlety.
The baddies have no character development of any kind, and no signs of
normal human behavior. They are cartoon characters. They exist only to
make us hate them. They grunt maniacally and laugh while they rape
innocent women; they make demented faces and nasty comments while they mug
fearful oldsters. When we see them commit their crimes, we see every cruel
detail, so that we can be convinced that they have no mercy, no human
compassion. To picture a typical member of the Death Wish gangs, imagine
Mickey Rourke playing Long John Silver in modern dress. Got that picture?
Not evil enough. Too subtle. And way too classy.
The innocents, on the other hand, could not be more innocent. In this
film there's a sweet Mexican housekeeper who lives to make people smile
and to bring beauty of all kinds into her boss's home. And there's Charles
Bronson's daughter, who was raped in the first film, and is now a damaged
woman, perhaps 30 years old but permanently frozen in mute adolescent
innocence, smiling blissfully while she skips blithely and obliviously
around in her plaid schoolgirl skirt and her lily-white knee socks,
clutching her glass unicorn in one hand and an ice cream cone in the
other. I'm not kidding about any of that. She's like a Roman Polanski wet
dream.
After acts committed by such evil men against such innocent women, how
could Bronson do anything else but hunt the perps down? And how could we
have any sympathy for them when he wastes them? By the time the revenge
begins, our attitudes have been manipulated and cultivated so bluntly that
we have no time to pause and consider the moral reservations that we might
normally attach to vigilante justice. We simply enjoy the brutality of his
revenge.
The basic Bronson formula, i.e. the decent man taking an eye for an eye
against psychotic and degenerate rapists/killers, actually began two years
before Death Wish, in a film called Chato's Land, which was directed by
Michael Winner, the same man who directed the first three Death Wish
films. In that previous incarnation of Paul Kersey, Bronson played a
frontier Indian whose wife was brutalized by a bunch of demented former
soldiers led by Jack Palance. That film was a Western which took place
after the Civil War, but all of the Death Wish films are also really
Westerns, aren't they? They just happen to be thinly disguised in modern
dress. They are urban westerns, ala the Dirty Harry films.
The Bronson/Winner formula worked for a while, at least in the sense
that it was successful at the box office. (The numbers in parens below
represent the equivalent in 2010 dollars, as calculated from
this chart.)
- Death Wish $22m in 1974 ($90m)
- Death Wish II $16m in 1982 ($41m)
- Death Wish 3 $16m in 1985 ($34m)
- Death Wish 4 $6m in 1987 ($12m)
- Death Wish V $2m in 1992 ($4m)
The first one in the series was a hit. Number two was successful enough
that audiences still wanted to see number three. Unfortunately, number
three betrayed the premise by turning Bronson into a heavily armed
professional killer rather than a wronged husband and father. He set
elaborate Rube Goldberg booby traps and even fired a missile launcher at
one point. At that point, the humble and righteous architect had all but
disappeared. That just about snuffed the series, and Winner's departure
from the franchise sealed the coffin. There was little enthusiasm for the
releases of #4 and #5, and they were such weak films that there was no
hope for word-of-mouth success. Death Wish 5 has the dishonor of being
Bronson's lowest rated film at IMDb, as well as the last theatrical film
he would make.
The quality of the Death Wish films sank just about in tempo with the
box office, as reflected in the IMDb ratings shown below:
- (7.00) - Death Wish
(1974)
- (5.71) - Death Wish
II (1982)
- (5.51) - Death Wish 3
(1985)
- (4.64) - Death Wish
4: The Crackdown (1987)
- (3.96) - Death Wish
V: The Face of Death (1994)
