Death Wish (2018)

I’ve never been a huge fan of remakes.  Sometimes, if I’ve never seen the original, I can enjoy the remake to some extent.  However, I find that there’s usually little need to remake something that did well originally.  Bruce Willis stars in Death Wish, a remake of the 1974 movie starring Charles Bronson.  Although I haven’s seen the original, I still came away feeling like there was something lacking with the 2018 version.  (I currently don’t plan on seeing the original, as I’m not a fan of Charles Bronson, either.)

From what I can tell, the plot is fairly similar.  In this case, Bruce Willis plays Paul Kersey, a Chicago doctor who has to go to work one night.  He should be celebrating his birthday with his wife and daughter.  Due to the sudden change in plans, burglars break into the Kersey house expecting it to be empty.  The thieves end up killing Paul’s wife, Lucy, and putting their daughter, Jordan, into a coma.

It doesn’t take Paul long to look into buying a gun.  He decides not to do it legally, but manages to swipe a gun from a gang member-turned-patient after the gun falls on the ground.  (This is Chicago, after all.)  All he has to do is get some ammunition and he’s all set to go into vigilante mode.

His first time out, Paul manages to prevent a carjacking, but gets caught on video.  His face isn’t shown, which works in his favor.  He did sustain an injury, though.  Being emboldened by the experience leads Paul to try again and to ultimately go after the people that killed his wife.

The movie goes down pretty much as you’d expect.  The police don’t seem to be able to do much.  It’s not necessarily out of incompetence, though.  The detectives have dozens of similar cases, each requiring a good deal of attention.  Many cases that come across their desks don’t have much evidence to work with.

Buying a gun has all the normal hurdles, like waiting periods and paperwork.  It’s no surprise that Paul declines the legal route, yet jumps at a gun without his name attached to it.  (It also comes in handy later in the movie.)

I never got the impression that the movie was explicitly for or against gun violence.  You have radio and TV personalities giving commentary, but the violence seems more like a backdrop to one-liners and action sequences.  There doesn’t seem to be any attempt to have a pro- or anti-gun message.  This may actually benefit the story, though.  After watching the movie, I’m not sure that editorializing would have worked.  I can’t imagine Paul giving someone a lecture on the benefits or costs of owning a gun.

I’m not a big fan of violent movies.  Since I haven’t seen similar movies, it’s hard to judge if the movie is cliché or not.  It’s definitely not a parody.  The movie seems to take itself seriously.  However, it was lacking on any sort of a real plot.  I didn’t really feel like I was rooting for anyone.  I didn’t leave the movie thinking about any sort of message.

I wouldn’t go into the movie expecting anything grand or epic.  As I said, it’s mostly action with a few jokes here and there.  This is one of those movies that manages to stay very true to the coming attractions.  I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised as to whether or not they’ll like it.

IMDb page

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Note:  This review was originally posted to my Epinions account.

 

I’ve always been good at determining if I’d like a movie by the coming attractions.  I know that you can’t really judge a book by its cover, but I’m right 99.99% of the time.  While I liked Inglourious Basterds, I have to say that it wasn’t quite what I expected.

The movie starts with Colonel Hans Landa visiting a family on a dairy farm.  It’s the start of the German occupation of France and Colonel Landa is a Nazi officer looking for the one remaining Jewish family in the area.  He considers himself pretty good at what he does, as do many of the people that he’s come across.  It’s earned him the nickname The Jew Hunter.  He does find the family that he’s looking for, but allows one of them to escape.

Around the same time, American Lieutenant Aldo Raine is talking to his men.  He’s leading a group of men into France to hunt Nazis.  The group is made up of Jews, but come from all over the world.  One has even killed 13 Nazi officers before joining the group, known as the Inglourious Basterds.  The war hasn’t officially started for America, but the Basterds are going over a little early to get things rolling.

Fast forward a few years.  The woman that escaped Col. Landa is now running a theater under an assumed name, Emmanuelle Mimieux.  She’s approached by a Nazi officer, Pvt. Fredrick Zoller, who takes a liking to her.  Understandably, Ms. Mimieux doesn’t like him.  Pvt. Zoller can’t take ‘get lost’ for an answer, so he pursues her and eventually makes her an offer.  It turns out he’s a war hero that stared in a movie about the event that made him so well known.  He wants to use her theater for the premier.

She doesn’t like this at first, but talks it over with her projectionist.  Being that the projectionist is black, he doesn’t like Nazis, either.  The two decide that having so many Nazis in one place might be a good thing.  They hatch a plot to lock the group in and kill them all.

When the Basterds catch wind of the fact that the top four ranking Nazis (including Hitler) will be in attendance, they hatch a plan of their own.  With the help of a German actress/double agent named Bridget von Hammersmark, they can get in and plant explosives to take down the Nazis.

From the coming attractions, I got the impression that the movie was all about the Basterds.  The truth is that you don’t see much of them in the first half of the movie.  It isn’t until the second half that you really get to see more of them.  The movie is split between The Basterds and Mimieux.  I’m not saying that this is bad.  I can understand wanting to show Brad Pitt in the coming attractions.  It’s just that I could see a lot of people wondering if they got the right movie.

I have to warn you that the movie is more fiction than historical.  While some of the events are true, many of the events are not.  From what I can tell, there was no Bridget von Hammersmark, although she may have been based on an actual person.  (I couldn’t find anything beyond a character page in IMDb, but I’m sure I’ll get someone telling me that I’m wrong on this.)

Also, a good deal of the dialogue is subtitled.  As you might expect, much of the movie is in either French or German.  There’s even a little Italian mixed in.  Some of it is in English, but you can still expect to do a lot of reading.  The subtitles were a little small on my screen, but I do have a small screen.  I think whoever did the subtitles was expecting people to have a bigger TV set.

I’m going to have to put this in the 18+ category for the suitability for children.  This is a very violent movie.  When Landa kills the Jewish family, he does so without any sort of feeling or remorse.  He just kills them.  The Basterds do kill a lot of Nazis.  (Raine tells his men that they each owe him 100 kills and they’re expected to scalp those that they kill.)  Those that they don’t kill are given a scar and sent back to their Nazi commanders to tell them who the Basterds are.

On that topic, I did find one plot inconsistency.  Why put all of your top-ranking officials in one place?  As Landa points out, killing the top four will effectively end the war.  Doesn’t this seem too easy?  Even when the president addresses congress, at least one senator, representative or cabinet member is kept in a safe location just in case.  You’d think that at the very least, they’d have tons of security.

At 153 minutes, it’s a pretty long movie.  A little past the halfway mark, I found myself thinking, “crap… I’ve still got an hour to go?”  At least it picked up in the second half.  It took a while to set up the two main plots.   It really wasn’t that bad.  It‘s just that I thought that the movie had progressed more quickly than it really had.  I do think that the movie could have been trimmed by a few minutes in a few places, but nothing really dragged out to the point where I was waiting for that scene to be over.

Overall, I would recommend it.  I just wouldn’t recommend bringing the kids.  There will be a few uncomfortable moments. 

IMDb page