Death Wish - Rotten Tomatoes Score 17%

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Perhaps you're idly wondering how this remake of a 1974 vigilante-justice Charles Bronson flick engages with its subject, and interrogates the original film's assumptions and, perhaps, recontextualizes its central ethos of "we white straight men are under attack and thus are so completely justified in slaughtering — ah, defending ourselves — with extreme (and literal) prejudice"?

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It arrives in theaters now, mere weeks after the latest mass shooting, and wants its audience simply to nod vigorously along with every hail of bullets, to cheer every mutilation. It asks nothing, and offers only the blanket assertion that feelings of masculine inadequacy — "The most important thing a man can do is protect his family, and I failed," Willis declaims — can be obviated ballistically.

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2018 is turning out to be a truly inclusive year for on-screen representation. “Black Panther” invited African-American audiences to see themselves in a massive superhero movie that wasn’t about their own oppression, “A Fantastic Woman” gave transgender women the chance to see themselves in an acclaimed film that wasn’t terribly retrograde, and now Eli Roth’s dangerously enjoyable “Death Wish” gives right-wing lunatics the opportunity to see themselves in a fascist fairy tale that wasn’t directed by Dinesh D’Souza.

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More than just a feature-length commercial for the NRA, “Death Wish” is such a masturbatory fantasy for modern conservatives because it suggests that every do-gooder Democrat is really just a Republican waiting to happen.

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It’s a hell of a transition, and it hilariously begins — to use proper 2018 parlance — with Paul being cucked (that is, emasculated in situations where no real emasculation is happening) by every other man he encounters. A well-tailored beta male who lives in an immaculate Evanston house with his wife (Elisabeth Shue) and their beaming teenage daughter (future celebrity Camila Morrone), Paul is cucked by an aggro dad at a high school soccer game, he’s cucked by the homeless guy who tries to wash the windshield of his nice sedan, and he’s even cucked by his own brother (a sweet but shifty Vincent D’Onofrio), who leeches money off him at every opportunity. We’re talking about a guy who’s such a pansy-arse little snowflake that he’s too busy performing “emergency medical procedures” to protect his family from the trio of masked criminals that break into his house during an expertly tense (and strangely tasteful?) sequence that leaves Paul’s wife dead and his daughter in a coma. Serves him right — a real man would obviously have boobytrapped his suburban home with grenades before going out for the night.

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Exaggerating its gang-related gun violence until the Windy City starts to resemble the war zone that Donald Trump so desperately wants it to be

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I’d have to think real hard to remember a film that could not get released at a more tone deaf time. With big name sponsors cutting ties with the NRA after yet another senseless mass shooting, Death Wish is a poorly timed rebuttal. And a pretty lousy one at that.

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In 2018, this is a reboot that seems out of touch with ongoing concerns. Instead of a brainless action film, it plays out more like a propaganda piece for those who value the right to buy machine guns over human lives.

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And the irony seems completely lost of a white guy wearing a hoodie gunning down minorities in Chicago being a terrible look. Maybe Willis was going with an Unbreakable shout out, but the hoodie has in a lot of ways come to be symbolic of Black Lives Matter and to see it so dismissively used in this context is uncomfortable. Conclusion: Death Wish comes off too tastelessly tone deaf to work as a revenge thriller.

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As subtle as an NRA recruitment video, and about as emotional, Eli Roth’s “Death Wish” is that horror filmmaker’s remake of a ’70s vigilante film that nobody was asking for. Bruce Willis, looking decrepit and acting like he gave his last damn a dozen years ago, stars in what plays like an old man’s movie for angry, emasculated and frightened old men.

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Because when you can’t make us feel a thing in delivering “Look what those animals did to my baby,” standing over his comatose college-bound daughter’s hospital bed, getting revenge with firearms is the only option. Roth lets the picture dawdle as the Joe Carnahan script parrots a tirade of Fox News “Chicago– City of Death” talking points, an aural assault of talk radio hosts decrying their city’s GUN violence problem (Never mentioning the GUN part, or where the guns come from — lax-gun-law Mike Penceland)

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