Death Wish: The Mistitle
Updated: Oct 4, 2019
Honestly I went to this movie without much in the way of expectations. I'm sure you know the basics; a man's wife is killed and his daughter beaten into a coma, turning their mild mannered doctor/husband/father into a 9mm vigilante. But my friends wanted to see it. They were expecting some brutal action. And they got it. But the writer and director managed to conspire to sneak a solid, well thought out movie in there as well.
If this story has one issue its how long it takes to get going. Perhaps this was a deliberate attempt to ratchet up the tension levels for the audience. If so, I'd say the director overdid it slightly. Sure it increased the tension level for me, waiting for this man's perfect life to be wrecked, but at some point you just start saying 'get on with it'. At which point the suspension to disbelief is ruined.
But the movie is quick to take it back once the preliminaries are out of the way. Aside from that one possible flaw it has some well done action scenes with the various talking points in the war over gun control strewn unobtrusively throughout. I appreciated that the movie makes sure to expose the audience to both sides of the argument, but the course of the it's actions are anything but indecisive. Perhaps it would be naive to expect a movie about a man who tracks his wife's killers down to come down on any other team. And, to be fair it does kind of go back and forth a bit up until but the end, when he brings his daughter home from the hospital. The message is simple: an armed populous is a safer (there is no such thing as fully safe) populous.
Of course the other possible interpretation for this movie would be that unregistered guns murder and registered guns defend. Personally that seems a rather simplistic attitude to me.
I also appreciated the double blind with the brother, played by Vincent D'Onofrio.
The most puzzling thing about this movie is definitely the title. Is he wishing for death for himself? For the men who wrecked his life? Is it his wish that his daughter doesn't die? The title makes it sound as if he's suicidal, but the character was a bit more homocidal. Whatever the reason, I give this movie an 85%.