Death Wish (1974) Review
I’m in a pretty deep depression right now and sort of forgot I had this blog from when I was suffering from my previous bout of depression. My goal now is to write something about a movie I’ve seen recently everyday so I can have something to show to people when they ask what I do exactly. Anyway, nothing beats depression like uncontrollable violence and no film better exemplifies the mid-1970s violence than Michael Winner’s Death Wish.
Charles Bronson plays… well it doesn’t matter entirely. He effectively plays the same guy in almost every movie after his days hanging out with Sergio Leone and John Sturges. But he’s really good at being that guy. You know the guy: nice person with a well paying job, wife and maybe a kid who, after a horrific event involving the murder of his wife or kid or both, snaps and becomes a killer, only killing those who “deserve” it, the twist being that he always was a killer, but kept it hidden from his friends and family. A similar idea would be employed as recently as Bob Odenkirk’s Nobody (2021).
It’s an interesting debate throughout the film: do these people deserve to be killed? At the beginning, Bronson’s coworker (Bronson is mysteriously an architect who does nothing but point at dioramas) says that he’s a “bleeding heart liberal” because he thinks that some of the poor people in New York City might not be criminals. Evidently, he’s wrong because just a couple scenes later his wife and daughter are attacked by a young Jeff Goldblum (his first credited film role) and his pals. His wife is maimed and dies later in the hospital while his daughter is forever traumatized from the experience. Within the world which this story takes place in, criminality is distinguished by wealth and, while this does take place in the notoriously rough 70s New York, it does create a strange system where Bronson can easily distinguish between who will be robbing the elderly with their knives or with their pens, if you catch my drift. While Bronson never catches the attackers directly, he does exact revenge upon the city which has taken his idyllic life away from him.
Death Wish’s strengths lie in its ability for the audience to root for Bronson’s revenge, and admittedly I did, but never quite follows through with its blood lust. Some scenes take too long to get going and many of the side characters are nothing more than window dressing. However, the killings that do happen and the fact that the city becomes better over time, shown carefully though the daytime scenes eclipsing the nighttime scenes at the beginning of the film, show that Bronson still has that killer edge to him while maintaining his charisma. Simply put, it’s nice to see bad people be put in their place.
