Title – Death Wish (2018)

Director – Eli Roth (Hostel)

Cast – Bruce Willis, Elisabeth Shue, Camila Morrone, Dean Norris, Vincent D’Onofrio, Beau Knapp

Plot – After his wife and daughter are victims of a violent home robbery, mild mannered doctor Paul Kersey (Willis) takes matters into his own hands and sets about enacting justice on his city’s criminal population.

“If a man really wants to protect what’s his. He has to do it for himself”

Review by Eddie on 22/08/2018

Somewhere, sometime, somebody thought that what the world needed today was a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson classic Death Wish.

It’s an odd thing to have had happen and an even odder thing to consider after you sit through this dire and tiresome revenge thriller that completely fails in justifying its existence.

Why anyone thought we would want a reimagining of Death Wish isn’t the only question you will ask yourself after sitting through this dud of a film, as I know I for one became seriously fixated on what on earth has happened to not only actor Bruce Willis’s career, but that of the career of outspoken director Eli Roth.

How Roth’s career has spiralled to the depths of film’s such as this and other recent shockers such as Green Inferno and Knock Knock is a question we may never have an answer to but it’s sad to consider the man behind Cabin Fever and gore filled classic Hostel, has now found himself directing such a monotonous and thrill free affair.

With the barely trying Willis at its core, playing grieving doctor Paul Kersey who sets out to tackle crime head on after his wife is murdered in a violent home invasion and his daughter is left in a coma in the same attack, Roth did indeed have little chance of making Death Wish a film worth watching and sadly with the barebones script from the usually ace Joe Carnahan (another victim of this movies mediocrity), this so called thriller is DOA from opening scene until the last.

There have certainly been worse film’s released in the last year or so but Death Wish also commits the mortal movie sin of being highly offensive in a day and age where the idea of an everyday citizen carrying out acts of gun lead violence isn’t exactly the idea of solid entertainment and there’s no wondering as to why Roth’s film was lambasted by a large portion of critics in the United States for its misguided and badly timed sense of gun-filled justice.

You almost sense that Roth (whose wicked sense of humour has been a staple of his career) may’ve envisioned this experience as some type of darkly observed examination of justice and the state of American affairs but if that’s the case, his failed just as badly as he has at creating a thriller that engages, or indeed thrills.

Final Say –

We’ve seen this exact story told a million times before and told much better but what makes Death Wish much worse is its poorly executed moral compass and come the films credits, there’s little reason to find anything worth recommending in this boring and tepid excuse for a thriller. Another sad entry into the dwindling careers of its director and leading man, Death Wish is a film to avoid at all costs.

1 angry soccer dad out of 5