Death Wish (2018)

Death Wish arrives as the sixth entry in a franchise that began in 1974, and as the second telling of Brian Garfield's novel, which is to say it is a remake of a remake's source material. Bruce Willis plays Dr. Paul Kersey, a Chicago trauma surgeon whose wife is killed and whose daughter is left comatose after a home invasion. He then acquires a handgun, and the film proceeds with the grim efficiency of a man working through a to-do list. Eli Roth directs with a straight face and a fondness for improvised weaponry. The tone is brisk, the body count is generous, and the moral ledger is left entirely blank.

For a film released three weeks after Parkland, the cultural accounting here is remarkably thin. News broadcasts flicker across the screen showing a divided public, some calling Kersey a hero, others a menace. The film watches this debate the way a man watches traffic. It never joins it. Critics at the time faulted the picture for pandering to bloodlust while pretending to satire, and the charge holds. The criminals are drawn along familiar racial lines, and no one in the frame pauses to notice. The wife exists to be killed. The daughter exists to be hospitalized. Neither is granted a personality beyond the function she serves.

All that remains is a competent, mean-spirited revenge picture with a Golden Raspberry nomination and a B+ from audiences. It gestures toward a national argument about firearms and then walks away, content to let Willis point a finger gun at a bag thief in the final shot. There is no economic critique, no environmental conscience, no interest in identity of any kind. As a specimen of modern social consciousness, it registers as almost nothing at all. The sommelier swirls the glass, finds no vintage, and sets it down.