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The Death Wish remake starring Bruce Willis and directed by shock-horror auteur Eli Roth hit Prime recently, along with the 1974 original starring Charles Bronson. As a fan of vigilante revenge movies and the shared cultural myth in which they stew—the idea that one man, alone and prepared, is the only way to correct the world’s unfairness—I highly recommend both.
Death Wish was seen as an odd film to remake at this particular time, given that violent crime rates in most of our cities have plummeted. Roth’s film was denounced as “Trumpian fantasy” by some in Chicago, the skyrocketing murder rate of which made it an acceptable stand-in for mid-1970s New York City.
But crime rates don’t really correlate with these sorts of films in any meaningful sense. If crime rates were what mattered, there’d be no reason to make Southern California the setting for Peppermint, a gender-swapped version of The Punisher starring Jennifer Garner. What matters more in these films is their willingness to show us a world in which control can be snatched away at any moment, held hostage until someone with the will to take it back comes along. Which is exactly what happens to Riley North (Garner) in Peppermint, her family gunned down by gangsters while they’re at a carnival, her life in ruins until she acquires the skill —and the will— to repay their killing.
Peppermint is slightly unusual in that it posits a police force and judicial system more corrupt than incompetent; the cops and prosecutors and judges in these films are typically overwhelmed rather than dirty. They’re even often a bit sympathetic to our outlaw heroes. Think of Detective Kevin Raines’s (Dean Norris) wall of unsolved cases in Death Willis (which is what I’ve taken to calling it), each card a reminder of a cold body whose killer won’t come to justice. Think of the cops charged with tracking down Charles Bronson’s vigilante in the 1974 original, the detective who breaks into apartment 4A (violating the Fourth Amendment rights of the self-described bleeding heart who has discovered a newfound love for the Second Amendment) not so much to arrest Paul Kersey (Bronson) but to ask him to stop because he’s making the higher-ups look bad.
This trope of the cop who outsources his work to normal folks who can’t take it anymore reaches its apotheosis in The Brave One, Neil Jordan’s 2007 flick starring Jodie Foster as an NPR-style radio host who turns into a Bernie Goetz-style specter of vengeance haunting New York’s streets and subway stations. After Erica Bain (Foster) and her fiancée David (Naveen Andrews) are brutally assaulted, Erica finds comfort and safety from the cold steel of a gun. What follows is de rigueur—she shoots a murderer in a bodega after he tries to kill her; she guns down a couple of hooligans on a train who rob a boy and threaten her with rape—until she goes after a mobster that Det. Mercer (Terrence Howard) complained earlier in the film he was unable to nail.
Her escalation opens his eyes to the injustice of the system as it exists, resulting in him not only letting her go after she tracks down the trio of thugs who destroyed her life but actively aiding her in their execution and the coverup thereof. A world without someone who can take control is a frightening, disordered world indeed.
“I never understood how people lived with fear,” Erica says over the radio, stumbling, trying to make sense of her new reality via monologue. “People afraid of people. I always believed that fear belonged to other people. Weaker people. It never touched me. And when it touches you, you know that it’s been there all along, waiting beneath the surface of everything you loved.”
We, like Erica, generally tell ourselves a story about our life: that the world is ordered, that random acts of violence happen to other people. All of these films are, in their own ways, retellings of the same modern myth about the individual who overcomes the horror of the world through the cleansing power of violence. As Christopher Sorrentino put it in his 2010 treatise on 1974’s Death Wish, director Michael Winner “wants to use the city for one thing only, as the sinister backdrop of a series of mythical confrontations.” It’s worth noting that the film’s action never brings Kersey closer to getting revenge on the individuals who killed his wife and raped his daughter. His lead-filled exploits constitute a more general form of payback, a lashing out against criminality in general. These battles are waged in the comfortable knowledge that “crime and violence are scourges visited upon a respectable and peace-loving citizenry from without,” a pleasing, if ultimately untrue, notion.
James Wan (Aquaman) took that idea of vigilante movie as modern myth and made it literal in his 2007 film Death Sentence. Despite starting as a rather standard revenge movie—Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) sees his son killed and kills the gang member responsible; the gang seeks retribution—it quickly escalates into something more bizarre, something darker. The film’s lurid finale begins when Hume, who has been wounded in his side and on the palm of his hand, is resurrected, waking in the hospital following a gunshot wound.
Back from the dead, Hume wages war on the gang members who have tormented him at their headquarters: an abandoned hospital off “Stygian Street.” As if the reference to the river Styx and Hume’s stigmata didn’t make things obvious enough, Wan stages the final shootout in a chapel bathed in crimson and gunmetal. By film’s end, Death Sentence isn’t a revenge movie. It’s a religious nightmare, a black mass, the logical culmination of the revenge impulse’s death drive.
Death Sentence is so unsettling in large part because it serves as a rejection of the Death Wish creed, a refutation of the myth that control can be restored to our lives with the proper application of force. And this may be why some of us will always prefer Eli Roth’s vision of vengeance. Our inability to protect those we love is too terrifying to contemplate; it’s much more pleasing to dream of Tactical Furniture and good-old-fashioned firepower taking the place of fear.
Sonny Bunch is the executive editor of, and film critic for, the Washington Free Beacon. He’s also a cohost of The Sub-Beacon podcast and a contributor to the Washington Post.
