Presents

Death Sentence

If you know me, or have been to this website before, the you know that one of my all time favorite movies is Death Wish.  There's something about this particular 70s movie that straddles the line between 'legitimate' movie and exploitation, between drama and action movie, so perfectly that you can't really help but enjoy it on more than one level.  Well, a new movie, taken from a book written by the same author, updates the themes and conveys the message that the original story told, while still managing to ride the exploitation edge fairly well.  It stars Kevin Bacon and it's Death Sentence.

  Death Sentence finds Kevin as a quiet family man.  He works in risk assessment, which even sounds like a boring job, and his family life is everything to him.  When his oldest son (who seems to be Kevin's favorite) is killed in gang initiation, Kevin snaps.  When he appears to testify against the kid who killed his son, he refuses to identify him because the sentence that the state asking doesn't seem to be enough.  So, Kevin tells the judge he can't remember for sure, the kid is released and Kevin follows him home.  This is where Death Sentence takes a swerve away from Death Wish territory.  In Death Wish, Bronson's second thoughts are mild, while in Death Sentence, Bacon's are plainly obvious and seem to be much deeper.  Perhaps this is a testament to the superior acting ability of Bacon over Bronson, or it could be that times have changed and Hollywood won't make a movie about a stone-cold killer who's supposed to be the hero of the movie.  In any case, Kevin kills the kid who killed his son, despite his conscience, and begins to deal with what he's done, when the rest of the gang finds out who killed one of their own and begin a war on Kevin and his family.

Death Sentence differs from Death Wish in that you'll find yourself rooting for the main character, but you'll still understand his qualms with what he's doing.  Death Wish asked it's audience to be angry with Bronson over what had happened to his family and we identified with his pain, Death Sentence asks those same things of us, but also asks us to ask ourselves if violence is really the answer.  It's a deeper movie that the first, but it's just as good.  I'm giving Death Sentence four out of four cigars, because while Kevin Bacon is an unlikely choice to play a vengeful anything, he fits perfectly here as the 'everyman' who's grief drives him to go places that he never thought he'd go.  It's a great companion to Death Wish, where one is more of an action/revenge movie, the other is an action/thought-provoking movie.  It's certainly worth your rental dollar!  So, until next time, when I'll be stalking the streets with a sock full of quarters, remember that the best movies are bad movies.