Justin here again. Yesterday we took a look at Death Wish II and the outlandish Death Wish 3. Today we're going to finish things up by looking at Death Wish 4: The Crackdown and Death Wish V: The Face of Death.
Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
Death Wish 4 pretends that its crazy predecessor never existed. This time, Charles Bronson's Paul Kersey is back in LA, the setting for Death Wish II. Paul is back in the middle of a happy relationship with a new girlfriend, another reporter and her daughter. If you guessed that the daughter would be raped and killed, you're wrong! This time around she dies of a crack overdose. After it becomes apparent that the police won't do anything about it, Bronson once again dusts off his guns to take on the street trash responsible. The key difference this time is that instead of killing off low level punks for the next 90 minutes, Paul targets the mafia.
We're back in the Death Wish II level of plausibility. I say that the action in Death Wish 4 is plausible, but that plausibility is relative to the absurdity of part 3. Bronson is in his late 60's now, but he takes out the mob using skill and intelligence rather than pretending to be in a first person shooter. Kersey uses spy tricks like tapping phones and one of the best movie gadgets I've ever seen - an exploding wine bottle. So yeah, this makes more sense than walking down the street with a Browning machine gun. It still seems a little off that a conscientious objector would have the special ops training required to pull off all this light espionage, gun play, and long-range sniping.
For the most part, the mob members that Bronson takes out one by one are the stereotypical mobsters you would expect to see in any formulaic action flick. There's the paranoid leader, the unquestioning muscle, and the low-level pushers. Interestingly though, this organization's favored hit man is a black opera singer.
Two gangs run drugs in LA under an uneasy truce - until Kersey steps in. Kersey plays the two gangs against each other without them knowing. Kersey's manipulations culminate in a epic shoot out between the two factions at an oil rig. Honestly, I wasn't really sure what was going on the majority of the time that the two gangs were maneuvering against each other. Of course, all you need to know is that Bronson was gonna kill them all. Thrown into this mix is also a mysterious wealthy benefactor who bank rolls Bronson, and a crooked detective.
It's nice to see the movie look at the problems above the "street trash" by deciding to take on the mob. Bronson looks to some of the roots of the problem for once. Granted, he doesn't go as far as to diagnose the problems with the psyche of Americans (or man in general) that drives us to take drugs. At least he didn't walk around killing teenage drug dealers for 90 minutes. (editor's note: Again. -Miranda) I found the ending in particular to be quite satisfying, but I won't spoil it here. The movie slips into absurdity and borderline self parody, but nowhere near the extent of part 3.
Death Wish V: The Face of Death
With Death Wish V: The Face of Death, we return once again to roman numerals. This is the last in the series and was the only one not to be released in theaters. Accordingly, I dropped my expectations significantly. What I found was actually quite good and probably the most human entry in the series.
The movie starts with Paul Kersey happily dating a well-regarded fashion designer. He even gets along well with her teenage daughter. Before long, the villain is introduced: none other than the fantastic Michael Parks. He's running some sort of mafia organization that uses Bronson's girlfriend's textile factory as a money laundering front. The fact that in this movie Bronson is fighting against such a strong villain is somewhat of a departure for the series. In parts 1 and II, Bronson is fighting crime in general. I'd make that argument for part 3 as well, but things are narrowed somewhat as Paul fights a gang. Now, this gang is lead by one strong-willed antagonist, but for most of the movie, he is not the central focus. He's evil, but no more so than his cronies. In Death Wish 4, Bronson fights "the mob". However, those mob characters are so generic that there is no face to point to as being the evilest of the evil. Parks, however, is great in that capacity. His presence rivals Bronson's for interest and menace. He has some good tricks here too, all those scary textile machines, a pool full of lye, and a genuinely creepy transvestite hit man.
Of course it isn't long before things go horribly wrong and Kersey has to once again fight for justice. A new element is thrown in as it turns out Parks and Kersey's love interest were married at one point in time and now Parks has reclaimed custody of their daughter. It adds a level of urgency that isn't present in the other movies. Added to that, Bronson was in his early 70's when this was filmed. Yeah, 70's! We'll see if Stallone is still making action flicks when he's that old. I've read that Bronson was also dealing with the early stages of Alzheimer's during shooting. You would never know by his performance. He definitely plays the part as older and more mature than the other movies, and even pulls off a believable late 50's or early 60's here. What surprised me was that he showed more emotion in this one than the others. It looks like his girlfriend's death is actually taking an emotional toll from him. You see the internal struggle of him not wanting to be a vigilante again. There's a real sense of how much he cares for the supporting actors. And all of that combines to give his revenge even more impact. The stakes feel as high as in the first Death Wish. It feels like he could fail.
Just like in part 4, Paul works his way up the ladder of mafia thugs. The killings are probably the most believable since part one as well. There's a poisoning, an improvised explosive, and a couple of straightforward shootings. At one point, Bronson wraps a guy up head to toe in skin-tight shrink wrap. I actually squealed when this happened because I used to use one of these machines at a job and always wanted to see this.
The climax of this movie was the only part that really strained my suspension of disbelief. By that point though, I was having such a fun time watching it that I didn't care. The ending was a little abrupt. However, if you've seen more than one of these kinds of movies, you know that the ending isn't really the point. Ultimately, this movie was much better than it had any right to be. It was the 5th in an unlikely series, an action movie starring a 70 year old, and it was directed by the visionary who brought us Leslie Nielsen's 2001: A Space Travesty.
I'm not sure what I find so appealing about the Death Wish series. Bronson is fun to watch, but he's not what I'd consider a great actor by any stretch of the imagination. Over the course of five movies, you get the same basic story five times with slight variations. That story has been told better in other movies. There's some sort of X factor here that's extremely slippery and hard to capture in writing. You've seen movies that have it. The ones that you make your friends watch that they may or may not get it. These are the movies that speak to you on some level that transcends quality and reason. As Ben would say, “movies, not films,” and by that, we don't just mean some sort of fun disposable exploitation flick. Sure, one of those movies could have it, but so could some Criterion classic. I'm sure you get it though, otherwise you wouldn't have made it this far. I suppose I love the Death Wish series because it's movies like these that remind me why I love movies.