Tonight I'm reviewing the 2018 action/drama film, Death Wish, directed by Eli Roth and stars Bruce Willis, Vincent D'Onofrio , Elisabeth Shue, and Dean Norris. It is a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson Death Wish film, which was also based on a novel and spawned four other sequels. Dr. Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) is a surgeon who often sees the consequences of the city violence in the emergency room. When home intruders brutally attack his wife and young daughter, Kersey becomes obsessed with delivering vigilante justice to perpetrators of violent crimes. I'm not going to go into much of Charles Bronson's Death Wish series because I haven't seen those films in such a long time. I'm going to have to re-watch them all over again but I do know that they were impactful and groundbreaking films at the time; especially the first, second, and third one. When I heard that Eli Roth was rebooting the Deathwish series, I'll admit, I was not on board at all. Its bad enough that we keeping getting reboots to films that don't need to be rebooted, but when it was Eli Roth doing it, I was really worried. I do like some of his work but overall, he does have some very strange films and most of the time the writing isn't that great. With a shocking surprise, this film was actually pretty damn entertaining. It's definitely one of the most shockingly surprising films of 2018. I went into this film with very low expectations and wanted to hate it, but it was pretty good. Now I don't want to compare both Charles Bronson's Deathwish and Bruce Willis' Deathwish. It's definitely not impacting like Charles Bronson's film, but that's what made this one good how they went into a totally different direction. I mean they only copied the basic essentials, but they didn't carbon-copy it. Bruce Willis had a lot of fun in this film and you can see it as the movie goes along. I'm glad Bruce Willis did his own take of his character and didn't copy Charles Bronson. This film is extremely brutal, which I expected from Eli Roth. I love the practical gore they used and it's definitely a lot more brutal than expected, but that's a good thing. I enjoyed all of the performances from everyone and the story was pretty entertaining, despite it not being all that original. Its definitely your typical revenge story, which you expect from a Deathwish film. As far as my cons, there is a minor pacing issue in the beginning of the film. It does take a little bit to get to the scene where Bruce Willis' family is attacked. Usually you would see that more in the beginning, but they spent way too much time building up with the family. The villains are pretty standard and none of them really stand out. They're the typical thieving bandits that hurt people. The climax is pretty gruesome, but could've went on a little longer. I could go into it more but I'm going to leave it at that. I don't want to end up spoiling anything, but Eli Roth surprised me with this one. I hope in the future he can actually put this type of effort into many other films.
I'm going to give Deathwish a compelling grade on the Film Phreeks meter.
What were your thoughts on the new Deathwish film and the Charles Bronson series? Leave me a comment below and I'll see you in the next review.