Review – Death Wish

I’d seen two of the other movies in this series before watching the original, so this effort actually surprised me on a couple of counts. The biggest one is going to be hard to believe if you’ve never seen it, but the story actually features some nuances. Our hero begins the story as just another guy on the street, an architect whose military record is limited to CO service as a medic in Korea. But after his wife and daughter are attacked in their apartment (wife dead, daughter sexually assaulted into a catatonic state), he begins a descent into vigilante-dom. And while the subsequent pictures in the set tend to be simple revenge fantasies, here Bronson’s character takes to the task slowly and reluctantly. Also interesting is that he doesn’t end up getting the criminals who actually hurt his family (or at least not that I noticed), opting instead to kill muggers at random. As anti-crime action movies go, this is unusually emotionally honest. Worth seeing