[DVD REVIEW (R2)] DEATH SENTENCE
To pillage enormously from my excessively long introduction to my review of The Brave One, also known as “that other revenge movie” from this year, I’d like to class myself as a bit of an expert, if I say so myself, when it comes to ‘Revenge Movies’. There’s an entire subsection in my DVD collection dedicated to this very subgenre, which you can read all about here!
The keyword in the term “great revenge movies”, though, is “great” because a ‘revenge’ movie is all too easy to make but quite hard to make well. Steven Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme release a revenge-themed flick at a rate of one a month. That’s 24 revenge-themed flicks a year between the two of them and not a single one of them is good… let alone even coming close to being great!
The term “Revenge” is a noun that means the harm done to someone as a punishment for harm that they have done to you or someone else. Never has one single sentence or dictionary definition provided more inspiration and plot outlines for the movie industry then that of the word “Revenge”.
Like my love of conspiracy movies, great revenge movies are up there too in terms of out-and-out adoration. If the plot has the word conspiracy or revenge in it’s description then you can almost guarantee my interest is recorded (It used to be the same with “sporting underdog” movies until it become readily apparent that the formula was so stuck in stone that they were being released at a rate of 20 a year, all indistinguishable from the original 70s or 80s trendsetter!) yet in both the ‘revenge-tinged’ big releases this year, James Wan’s Death Sentence and Neil Jordan’s The Brave One, I didn’t see anything particularly new or exciting in them that made me think I hadn’t seen a revenge movie of this type before and want to rush out and see them.
Following poor box office receipts, Death Sentence has been rushed, under a “Blockbuster Exclusive” tag, on to DVD and a quiet Saturday night saw me and the new girlfriend checking this out alongside Shoot ‘Em Up and Lonely Hearts. Is it an under-rated little gem, a really quite cracking entry into the field of the “revenge movie” subgenre or is it the real piece of shit that critics would have you believe?
Based on Brian Garfield’s source novel, which stood in line with the writer’s own Death Wish (yes, the novel that became the good Charles Bronson movie and inspired the horrific subsequent Charles Bronson franchise!), the film revolves around Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon), a mild-mannered executive with a perfect life, until one gruesome night he witnesses his son being brutally murdered as part of a gang initiation. Realising that the murderer will not get the sentence he deserves (the prosecution are aiming for three to five years, Nick wants life!), Nick deliberately throws the murder trial (yes, you read that right: He. Deliberately. Helps. To. Get. His. Son’s. Killer. Freed. But fear not, this is not the stupidest thing about the film!) and, transformed by grief, decides to exact revenge on the killer himself. However, an eye for an eye leads Nick into a “gang war” that will devaste and break the surviving family he has left and lead him into a path he cannot come back from.
I’m an enormous fan of Kevin Bacon (and still am an unbeaten champion in the game of ‘Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon’) and consider the guy – along with Oliver Platt – to be the head of ‘The 39%ers Club’ (actors who are so consistently good that they can take a nothing role in a shitty movie and make it 39% better then it would have been without them in it!). He’s taken roles in either mediocre or downright terrible films (Where the Truth Lies, Beauty Shop, Trapped, Hollow Man, My Dog Skip, Picture Perfect, Murder in the First, The River Wild and The Air Up There to name a few) and made them nothing if not watchable.
Death Sentence is no different. It’s a piece of shit movie with a script devoid of any originality, surprise or nuance. It’s excessively violent and overly directed by James Wan like a really bad thrash metal music video, with a script full of nothing but exposition as dialogue and stupid-stupid-stupid plot mechanics that clunk on arrival, serving only to get our main character from one staged set-piece to another.
Wan struggles to serve up action sequences that involve us – in one moment, involving a punch-up/shoot-out/plummeting car on top of a multi-storey car park, you spend half your time going “Wait – where is he now? How did he get in that car? Where did that sloped embankment come from? What the hell is happening now?” – and the characters are poorly formed and, for the best part, woefully performed. Aiesha Tyler is beyond useless as the “cop on the trail” (such a good cop, considering Bacon’s character admits to murder and she nods sagely then wanders off), Kelly Preston is as effective as the “grieving mother” as a condom fed through a paper shredder and what the hell John Goodman is doing with his role I’ve no idea.
But, as tepid and obnoxiously poor as the film is, Kevin Bacon does elevate it above and beyond what it is into something bordering on watchable. Had someone like Paul Walker or Colin Farrell took the lead in this then I’d be all for calling this a pure “dog” of a film. Bacon, proving the weight of his acting abilities, takes a piece-of-shit movie (that doesn’t even have the tenancity to give us good villains to hate!) and turns it into a bearable piece of Saturday night entertainment.
It’s him, and him alone, that secures the film it’s finally rating from yours truly:
3 Responses to “[DVD REVIEW (R2)] DEATH SENTENCE”
Yeah, this didn’t look very good, so I skipped it.
I kinda liked it. Let me explain.. Everything you’ve said above holds.. It’s crap, but enjoyable crap. I didn’t come out thinking what a waste of time, as I have done from time to time, I still felt I learnt from it.
I liked the unsaid relationship that held between the 2 fathers in the film. It was purely the acting that did it, but you know if the writing is shit, someone has to pick up the slack.
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