Death Sentence [2007]
Director: James Wan
Actor: Kevin Bacon, Garrett Hedlund, John Goodman
This film is based on the book Death Sentence by Brian Garfield, and is the direct sequel to the book Death Wish which was made into a movie, starring the legendary Charles Bronson, in 1974. It became the quintessential and model for all vigilante/revenge films that followed, and has never really been equaled in its purity. Of course, there were many sequels to Death Wish, but none of them were any good, and it’s reported that Brian Garfield hated all of them because they never stayed true to the story. I have to agree; they all sucked.
Death Sentence is different, though. It all starts with a great director (arguable); James “Saw” Wan. While he’s primarily known for having written the gory Saw flicks, and directing the first one, the man knows like few others how to introduce a hefty dose of grit to a movie, and Death Sentence is no exception. The second brilliant move was the introduction of Kevin Bacon to the film. He is one of those actors that any movie can benefit from, and has a penchant for taking up gritty, ugly and controversial roles that others won’t touch with a fourty foot pole. Love the guy. Up next is John Goodman as the corpulent, but ultimately tough as nails father of the two main gangers in the film. He’s filthy and grimy, and it all fits so well that I really got the feeling that he might have been a little too comfortable in the role. And then last but certainly not least is Garrett Hedlund, who I didn’t really know before this film, but definitely is going to keep my attention for a while. While he doesn’t have an impressive array of films under his belt, and is usually cast in a pretty-boy, heart-throb role, his invocation of Billy Darley, the leader of the pack of ganger adversarials that Kevin Bacon faces looks the part to a T.
The story is (predictably) as followed; a senior vice president of a large financial organisation, Nick Hume (Bacon), spends most of his time doing risk-analysis on insurance bonds, until one night, while driving home from a hockey match with his son, he is forced to stop at a petrol station in a seedy part of town. Right before that he spots two hotrods driving in opposite direction without their lights on, and he signals them of that fact. Those of you who know the urban legends of urban America know that this is the start of a gang initiation; if you want to be in a gang, you have to kill someone entirely random to prove your worth. Drive around at night without your lights on and the first person to signal you is your target.
Anyway, they stop at a gas-station and the hotrods quickly drive up, stop, kill the store clerk and the young initiate is forced to kill Hume’s son. The family is devastated, and even more so when they learn that they won’t be able to get the killer in jail for more than 3 to 5 years. Hume decides to withdraw his eye-witness account and the killer goes free. Torn apart by grief, Hume takes matters into his own hands; he tracks the killer down and confronts him. He ends up killing him. The killer has now been killed, and his ganger friends – under the leadership of the killer’s older brother Billy (Hedlund) – decide to take revenge. When Hume’s wife is killed and he and his son are critically injured in a nightly raid on their home, he decides to take on Billy and his gangers and leaves behind any thoughts of risk-assessment and insurgences, and trades them in for violence and bloody retribution.
I really liked this film. It’s a bit overly sappy, hoping to invoke sympathy for Hume and his family’s loss rather early on in the film, but once the grit sets in – especially once Hume decides to shave his head – this movie comes close in grit toSeven, and that’s saying something. Billy and his gang remind me a bit of T-Bird and his cronies in The Crow and they play their part very well.