Death Wish (2018)

Director: Eli Roth
Starring: Bruce Willis, Vincent D'Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue

Synopsis:
A trauma surgeon takes the law into his own hands after a break-in results in his wife's death and leaves his daughter in a coma.

Impressions:
When I heard they were remaking Death Wish, my curiosity was piqued. Then I heard Eli Roth was directing and thought, "Oh, no. This is going to be terrible. It's going to completely miss the point of the original and be really tacky and exploitative while it's at it." And when I heard Bruce Willis was going to be playing Kersey, I was expecting him to be this one-man army action guy, so I was really dreading the prospect of seeing this. However, mostly just so I could pair this review with the original, I gave it a shot and I wound up being surprised. Yes, it does kinda miss the point. One of the best aspects of the original gets lost in making this more of a straight revenge story. However, it wasn't nearly as tacky as I was expecting from Roth, and Willis' Kersey isn't all that competent in the action scenes (barring the climax), as you would expect from an amateur at this game. Because they made Kersey a doctor in this version, there could've been some exploration of the moral conflict of someone who's dedicated his life to saving the lives of others regardless of who they are becoming a vigilante taking the role of judge, jury and executioner on himself. I will say the choice of present-day Chicago was a canny one, a good equivalent to the crime-ridden hive that was New York in the 70s. Overall, it doesn't have a patch on the original, but considering just how bad I was expecting it to be, I walked away fairly impressed. So long as you don't expect anything more from this than a fairly basic vigilante revenge movie, it's well enough worth a watch. There is a critical lack of Jeff Goldblum as a jive-talking rapist, though.

Rating:
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