It's cartoonish that in the current social climate someone thought a remake of the cult 70s Charles Bronson thriller Death Wish was a good idea. Yet here it is.
Directed by Eli Roth (Hostel), Death Wish is a film so remarkably bad in essentially every aspect that I genuinely wonder
if this is some elaborate joke and I'm simply missing the point.
How else could a film like this exist in 2018? Even if you set aside its brain-melting lack of logic and repugnant moralising it remains lazily directed and poorly written.
This Death Wish stars Bruce Willis (in the worst performance of his career) as a surgeon who starts dishing out his own vigilante street justice after his wife and daughter are brutally assaulted in their suburban mansion.
Willis' Paul Kersey, dressed in a hood and mercilessly killing gangsters and hoodlums (almost entirely people of colour, naturally) in an effort to take back the crime-ridden streets of Chicago, becomes a sort of violent folk hero. It is a nasty, deeply offensive, hard-right, wish-fulfilment fantasy, replete with tired cliches about the inner city -
evidently written by someone who has neither been to a city nor heard of one outside of bad 80s cop movies - and the occasional flickers of casual fascism.
