Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
9/6/07
It happens all the time in
movies: the hero lusts for revenge on the bad guy, bringing down
all his plans and henchmen to finally stand gun-to-head with the fiend
and be struck by an epiphany: “Don't do it! It'll make you just like
him!” Honestly, while I get the sentiment, I've always found this
to be a cheap and unearned device: it's an awful lot of split-second
soul searching for a guy who's just moved Heaven and Earth to get to this
point without giving that a moment's thought. But I'd buy it a lot
more from now on if their inner Dalai Lama would just cry out “Don't do
it! You don't wanna end up like Kevin Bacon in Death Sentence!”
Making this point as well as humanly possible, the first non-horror outing
from Saw director James Wan is a relentlessly gripping thriller
that depicts a positively Shakespearian tragedy of murder, revenge, and
the special madness that lies in the words “If I stop now, it'll all have
been for nothing”.
Risk analyst Nick Hume (Kevin
Bacon) has a perfect life with his wife Helen (Kelly Preston) and sons
Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) and Lucas (Jordan Garrett). Brendan is
the favorite, and Nick's only too happy to drive him to The Big City for
a special hockey game. On their way home, the car runs low on gas
and Nick pulls into a grungy gas station while Brendan heads inside for
a Slurpy and gets his throat slit by Joe (Matt O'Leary) as part of a gang
initiation. Nick sees the killer's face and prepares to testify against
him until he learns the relatively light sentence the DA expects.
Suddenly, he's fuzzy on the details, resulting in an acquittal. But
as the title implies, Nick has decided to hand down his own death sentence,
murdering the kid in cold blood that night. It doesn't end there.
The gang's leader Billy (Garrett Hedlund) is Joe's brother, and soon he's
looking for lethal revenge of his own. And so it goes, an eye for
an eye for an eye, until all that remains of Nick is a homicidal maniac
obsessed with “making the equation balance”.
Death Sentence, based
in name only on Brian Garfield's 1975 Death Wish sequel, is working
on two different levels. On the surface, it's an electrifying thriller
about the suburban nightmare that sells newspapers and keeps local news
ratings up: venture into the Big Bad City, take one wrong turn, and
maniacal gangsters will stop at nothing to kill you and everyone you love.
Wan mounts several exciting action sequences, best of all a breathless
foot chase between Nick and Billy's gang that starts in the streets and
ends on top of a parking garage. But as unforgivable as the initial
crime is, Nick brings what follows on himself (and others) by believing
he can kill without consequences, just like Joe. It's the way he
takes a tragedy and turns it into a full-fledged cycle of violence that
most fascinated me, and Bacon is stunning in the role. Grief gives
way to rage, which gives way to desperation and finally to insanity.
But it's only when he's truly lost his mind that he's finally ready to
be the vigilante action hero the ads promise. Draw whatever parallel
you wish to the global conflict of your choice. I especially liked
the way Nick ends up going to buy guns from the very man (John Goodman)
the gang he's fighting reports to.
Wan doesn't flinch from the
story's inherent violence. In fact, he ups the ante for what guns
can do to the human body as high as I've seen it go. While some will
consider an anti-violence movie awash in brutal gore to be hypocritical,
I think it's kinda necessary to make the violence as extreme as possible
to make an audience that's seen a million actors pretend to die on screen
feel like they're watching true moral transgression. The cinematography
by John R. Leonetti fills the screen with appropriate levels of filth and
disease, and Charlie Clouser's wonderful, pulse-pounding score keeps the
tension sky-high.
As I've mentioned, this is
one of Bacon's best performances. There isn't a violent or creepy
bone in his body as the film opens, and I loved how the initial phases
of his disintegration pass for simple grief at the office. There
are two different scenes where he seems to completely bottom out, the second
showing that I'd misjudged how low he could go, and Ian MacKenzie Jeffers'
excellent script doesn't need to give him any words at all to convey his
character's tragic arc (though he does give a tremendous speech in a family
member's hospital room late in the game). And kudos to whoever shaved
his head for the climax: I've never seen a more authentic, less cool
psycho haircut, with random swatches of hair sticking out in all the spots
he missed. Darley is a scary and imposing bad guy, who succeeds in
his pivotal task of being so bad that no matter how far Nick goes to finish
him off, he still seems to deserve whatever he gets. There's something
sympathetic about O'Leary (who I still remember at a much younger age from
his chilling performance in Frailty) that has the opposite effect:
no matter how bad what Joe's done is, the way he reacts when Nick takes
him by surprise by a dumpster makes the revenge that follows just seem
wrong. Preston, Garrett and Lafferty hit all the right notes as Nick's
family, both in the happy days frozen in home videos we watch over and
over and as the joy and finally life bleeds out of them. Goodman
is utterly odious in his few scenes, and Aisha Tyler does a nice job as
the cop whose initial sympathy for Nick gives way to frustration and finally
disgust.
Death Sentence will
be a tough sell, particularly with 20th Century Fox's ads playing up the
revenge angle at the expense of all the movie's subtleties. I can
only roll my eyes at the poster pictured above, given how unsuccessful
Nick's methods to Protect What's His prove to be. But even for audiences
willing to take the film on its' own terms, the mash-up of uber-violence
and anti-violence will play only to those on a specific wavelength.
Like the guy who gave The Condemned four stars. |
