In fiction, we invent guys to get mad at, it’s true. These baddies are meant to provide us some degree of catharsis: We want to see Indiana Jones punch a Nazi or John Wick mulch an army of henchmen because we can’t stand the existence of Nazis and because we have all experienced setbacks that hit us when we were trying to cope with grief. These cathartic stories don’t solve a real-world problem and don’t mobilize anybody to solve it: Kurt Vonnegut once equated the sum total of every artist’s virulent opposition to the Vietnam War as about as effective as “a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.”
So, it’s particularly dispiriting when you run across a movie that takes the trouble to invent bad guys for itself that are actively harmful to society, that feed dark impulses instead of noble ones, and that drive its star to eventual bitterness over his role in the whole mess. Death Wish is a great example of gritty 1970s New York action movie tourism. It’s no Taxi Driver, but it begs to be watched in a double feature with it. Unfortunately, it may stand as the most well-known film in Charles Bronson’s career, and that’s a shame. It’s important to remember that as ridiculous as this film and the low-rent series it spawned seems now, it also seemed that way to critics in 1972.
In the 50 years since its release, I feel it’s important to ask: Why Death Wish? Why, always, Death Wish? Because it seems to be a rallying cry for the sort of political figures and voters who seem to think that America’s cities are fallen dystopias where every resident is better off dead.
Paul Kersey (Bronson) is an architect in New York, an avowed liberal wuss with a wife and daughter who merrily skip to the grocery store and, the film seems to believe, are basically responsible for their own victimization. They are assaulted by a group of violent punks who kill Kersey’s wife and rape his daughter, leaving her in a vegetative state. (Rape being treated as a fate worse than death is a can of worms I don’t even want to open. Have some supplemental reading.)
Kersey slowly and inexorably starts losing his grip on his steadfast liberal values. A trip out to Tucson for work, where a rootin’ tootin’ business associate takes Kersey to the shooting range, makes all of this painfully explicit. He can’t be a lefty bleeding heart softy anymore! The problem with New York is that it’s not gun country!
Kersey brings his new gun back to New York and begins to purposefully seek out trouble on the dark streets. Starting with a sock full of quarters and eventually graduating to the gun, Kersey starts singling out criminals to blow away, causing an international flap as “the vigilante” causes crime in New York to plummet.
Police are onto him before long, however. But when he finally does get caught, police let Kersey off with a warning, and pack him onto a train to Chicago.
Death Wish isn’t a bad movie, and there are lurid thrills to be had watching as Bronson struggles with his rage and the horror of what he’s done and ultimately becomes a creature of vengeance. There’s some (some!) indication that you’re supposed to view this fall as a tragedy and the NYPD’s tacit approval of it as a sign of deep rot. But the very last shot is Bronson seeing some more young punks in Chicago and doing a finger gun at them, an assurance that he’s not going to stop taking the law into his own hands.
Both Siskel and Ebert panned this one, and numerous other critics called its transparently reactionary politics odious. Compare with Die Hard, which certainly has a conservative streak running through it but that doesn’t excite nearly the same distaste.
So why Death Wish? Why, despite every serious person calling this movie and its sequels alarmist, red meat nonsense, do we still apparently hold some room in our hearts for the had-it-up-to-here-and-on-a-rampage vigilante? They did a remake in 2018, and were talking about one in 2008. Though none ever reached the same heights as the original, the series itself ran for 20 years.
Crime was pretty bad in the 1970s. It’s understandable, to a degree, why stuff like Death Wish got released then, and why the 1980s were characterized by the destructive and dehumanizing War on Drugs. But we’re over all that. From 1993 onward, crime has plummeted in the United States, no matter whose data you believe. And yet, if you click through to that same Pew Research study, public concern about crime, among all demographics, is getting higher.
I have my own theories on this, starting with the fact that when the leading cause of death among your society’s children is gun violence, violent crime certainly must seem a larger problem even if in the aggregate it is going down. So many other causes of death and disfigurement have been reduced—factory accidents, childhood diseases, car accidents, all have been slowly reduced by some combination of regulation and science—that when crime does happen to us, it feels even more unfair. Our prosperity has led us to feel more outraged by it. We’ve solved all these other problems, why not this one? (The answer is that we stubbornly resist gun control, a topic Death Wish’s target audience have indicated they have no interest in.)
Knowing all that, though, is there a reason to give this thing a watch 50 years on? Death Wish is a good time if you turn your brain off and you think Charles Bronson is one of the more fascinating leading men in action movies. He has a toughness that’s hard to qualify, and that is always fun to watch, even in trash.
The other reason to watch Death Wish and every other entry in the franchise, if you can stomach them, is that they invariably contain the most out-of-nowhere character actors who have all gone on to do the kinds of work that makes these movies unquestionably the most embarrassing things in their respective filmographies. Jeff Goldblum will forever be the goon in Death Wish who wears a Jughead hat and rapes Charles Bronson’s daughter and then just gets away with it.
Oh, and Laurence Fishburne.
Wait, Alex Winter, too?? At least he seems chagrined about it.
And yes, you knew it was coming: Danny Trejo.
As with so many adaptations of novels or other, more complex works, Hollywood (or just Cannon Films, in the case of the middle three entries) couldn’t actually carry over any of the nuance, it seems. Author Brian Garfield’s original novel was not meant to celebrate the actions of Bronson’s character (Paul Benjamin in the book), and Garfield actually wrote a corrective sequel soon after the movie because he was that annoyed with it. Bronson seemed to share some of Garfield’s discontent, having said that he felt he was miscast and that somebody more like Dustin Hoffman—an actor better at portraying a weaker person—would have been a better choice.
Yet, Bronson did ultimately star in Death Wish and its numerous, increasingly terrible and silly sequels, each of which become dumber, meaner and more callous toward the women in them. It’s actually incredible (in the way a circus sideshow is) how tone-deaf these things are, and how utterly disinterested in these menaced and murdered women the movies are beyond how they excuse Kersey’s rampages.
By the fifth movie, Death Wish V: The Face of Death, you have to wonder how Paul Kersey remains so good at dating women who are obviously doomed to die and so bad at preventing them from being callously murdered. In Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, you almost think Kersey’s girlfriend is going to make it before she’s shot to death in the last scene, whereupon he explodes the completely unrepentant bad guy with a grenade launcher and then walks off. Zero mourning period!
Death Wish is responsible for all of that, and the fact its last entry dropped in 1994—a year after Last Action Hero hit theaters and crime trends started to plummet as I mentioned above—is perhaps one of film history’s most fitting data points. You can’t lay the persistent, spittle-flecked anti-urban, anti-minority sentiment of the American right at this movie’s feet, but you can blame director Michael Winner and producer Dino De Laurentiis for shamelessly deciding to feed those odious sentiments instead of make any attempt at adapting the actual underlying message of the book.
Thankfully the 2018 Bruce Willis remake underperformed at the box office and there seems to be no talk of reviving the property. But, as our politics continue shrieking about our metropolises being modern day Sodoms, it seems inevitable that we’ll get some other work ready to jump up and take up the mantle of Death Wish.
Kenneth Lowe is a regular contributor to Paste Movies. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.
