Director Report Card: James Wan (2010)

4. Insidious

With “Saw,” James Wan had launched the most popular horror franchise of the 2000s. His subsequent motion pictures had failed to duplicate that breakout success. By 2010, the “Saw” series had been bled dry by yearly sequels. Also clipping into the “Saw” installments' box office by this point was “Paranormal Activity,” a new horror franchise cranking out annual movies. Rather than try and beat 'em, Wan decided to join 'em. He teamed up with Oren Peli and Jason Blum, those responsible for the rival series, to create a new horror film. Concerned that the graphic gore of the “Saw” movies had convinced people he only made splatter flicks, Wan and Leigh Whannell's next collaboration would focus on the classical idea of a haunted house. Supposedly made for one and a half million dollars, “Insidious” would gross over one hundred times its budget at the box office. The film's success would further cement Blumhouse as the defining mainstream flavor of horror going into the new decade, launch a series of its own as well as numerous other haunting flicks with descriptive one-word titles, and proved that James Wan wasn't going away any time soon.

The Lambert family has a seemingly happy existence. Josh and Renai have recently moved into a wonderful new home, with their kid in tow: Oldest son Dalton, middle child Foster, and newborn baby Kali.. After an incident in the attic, Dalton falls into a coma that no doctor can explain. This proceeds increasingly frightening paranormal activity, seemingly targeting Renai. The family moves into a new home but the haunting only intensifies. Desperate, Josh and Renai bring in a team of psychic researchers. They believe Dalton has astral projected into an extra-dimensional realm called the Further, attracting the attention of malevolent spirits and a red-faced demon. Dalton is awoken by the team's efforts but the horror is far from over. He inherited his powers from his dad, Josh having a long history with these particular otherworldly entities. 

Wan and Whannell have spoken of their influences over the years, how “The Amityville Horror” and the case files of the Warrens scared the crap out of them as kids. You can see echoes of both of these in “Insidious.” As in “Amityville,” this is the story of a husband and wife with a couple of kids moving into a new house, only to be beset by supernatural terror. As in reality, parapsychologists appear to investigate. Another likely influence was “Poltergeist,” as both this film and that one have the family banding together when one of the children is “taken.” However,  “The Amityville Horror” was as much about the financial pressures that tear the family apart as the paranormal ones. While “Poltergeist” was a story of a family realizing the love they have for each other is more valuable than their Reagan era luxuries. Which raises the question: What is “Insidious” about? 

It's not about money, that much is clear. Renei is a stay-at-home mom, who writes songs in her spare time. Josh is a teacher, somehow able to take care of three kids, a wife, and a new house on that meager salary. When the otherworldly incidents become more than Renei can handle, she demand that the family moves into another house. Which they do, seemingly without any further financial burden being placed on them. We do see the two starting to argue as Dalton's condition remains unchanged and weird shit continues to happen, with Josh staying longer at work seemingly to avoid the problems at home. This amounts to all of one scene though. The couple otherwise seem happily married, loving all three of their kids. “Insidious” seems to resist the traditional subtext of the haunted house genre, in which the disturbance in the home is much more than spiritual.

In that case, what is “Insidious” about? The film's pithy tagline was “It's not the house that's haunted.” This is all but repeated in dialogue. Much as in Peli and Blum's “Paranormal Activity” franchise, it is a person that the unrestful spirits are attached to, not a structure. Josh's mom has photographs of the boy from his youth, a ghostly presence lurking in the background of each. He has totally suppressed and forgotten the childhood horror that apparently haunted him. Despite that, it has returned to infect his son, who is now more at risk than he ever was. When paired with the downbeat ending, “Insidious” becomes a story of how the past is never totally done with us. Josh may have buried his childhood trauma but it has been revived in his own son, much the way a genetic mental illness, the cycle of abuse, or alcoholism reoccurs throughout a family bloodline. 

Whether “Insidious” is knowingly invoking themes of childhood abuse or not, there's definitely one point the film seems to be making: The supernatural is real and only professional ghost hunters can help. Once medium Elise Rainier and her team of parapsychology researchers enter the film, “Insidious” uncritically embraces new age bullshit. Spirit photography is invoked. Rainer's sidekicks, Specs and Tucker, use all sorts of heat and energy detecting gizmos to determine something is amiss. Why they need to do this, when Elise is psychic and can receive visual impressions of these demonic spirits, I don't know. All of this climaxes with the script's embracing of astral projection as a literal fact. I love horror movies and I love folklore. I don't mind any number of goopy, New Age hooey being included in a horror film to build up its own story or ideas. However, considering “Insidious” is a test run for “The Conjuring” – a full-term reputation laundering for a pair of fraudsters and kooks – it's hard to perceive its embracing of ghost hunting hokum and astral plain nonsense as anything but a sincere endorsement. 

This reveals another problem with “Insidious.” It is, in fact, an extremely silly motion picture. James Wan and his team are adapt at the brass tacks techniques of engineering effective scares. The first half of the movie features multiple, quiet and still shots of the family in their home. This establishes a sense of place and, with it, a sense of normality. The mundane first act is devoted to Renei playing with Dalton and the other kids, the couple bonding, and other scenes of domestic tranquility. The film is establishing a “normal” world, one any of us can recognize, that will soon be disrupted and distorted by the horrors to come. Wan is good at this and “Insidious” is genuinely most effective in its earlier scenes, when the creeping sense that something is going to go very wrong, very soon is unavoidable. 

If “Insidious” was Wan's attempt to prove he didn't need the grisly violence of the “Saw” movies to scare an audience, it's a mixed showcase. On one hand, a decent attempt is made to build a creepy ambiance. The ghostly activity starts small, with an alarm going off or a shadowy figures spotted on the wall. Too often, however, these scenes pay off in the loudest and most obnoxious types of shrieking scares imaginable. This is most apparent in one of “Insidious'” trademark sequences. Barbara Hershey as Josh's mom – named Lorraine, another likely nod to the Warrens – relates a nightmare she had that further suggests the demonic spirit at the story's center. It's an effectively spooky moment that builds to a head in bright red and black face paint standing behind Patrick Wilson and roaring like a tiger. That's supposed to be a big scary moment but it comes off as thuddingly loud and rather goofy to me. 

Sadly, that is an omen of things to come. “Insidious” looses a lot of steam after the Lamberts move to a new home, all the work it did establishing a sense of location in the first hour going out the window. At that point, the ghosts stop messing around and start getting in people's faces. A boy dressed like a Dickensian ragamuffin leaps from a closest at Renei. In one utterly hilarious scene, little Dalton springs to life and starts throwing grown men around a room while a stringy-haired goth dude licks people's faces. In its last act, “Insidious” sends Patrick Wilson through a carnival-style house of horrors, the man walking from room to room as he encounters one ghostly tableau after another. All of these spectres utilize well-trotted visual clichés. There's a ghostly bride, people smiling ominously, and a demon with cloven hooves who sharpens his nails like Freddy Krueger. By far the most egregious miscalculation made is trying to mine an old song for post-modern creepiness. Wan chooses Tiny Tim's trilling, ukulele strumming weirdo novelty classic “Tiptoe Through the Tulips.” That's a song I associate with listening to Dr. Demento, not with otherworldly horrors.  

“Insidious” never blinks either, playing all of its goofy attempts at scares with utmost seriousness. The film only grows more humorless as it goes along, fully invested in its own dumb-ass mythology. Rather than simply calling its spirits ghosts or demons, the script quickly starts to throw around its own language. “The Further” is the term it cooks up for the extra-dimensional world its nasty spooks hang out in. When paired with multiple dead-serious monologues about the ominous and evil forces that nearly claimed Josh as a youth, and the powers of hypnosis, you get the feeling that Wan and Whannell thought they were writing the horror version of “Lord of the Rings” or something. Most long running horror series invent a fabulous mythology out of happenstance, the natural extension of running a simple idea out as long as you can. “Insidious” wants that right from the get-go and doesn't have the handling on modern folklore the way, say, “The Blair Witch Project” did.

Perhaps I'm overthinking all of it. James Wan set out to dispel the notion that he was only a gore guy. Obviously, “Insidious'” box office success and the subsequent decade of hits Wan has directed proved that again and again. However, “Insidious” actually has a lot more in common with Wan's breakout film than he'd probably like to admit. John R. Leonetti, his “Dead Silence” and “Death Sentence” cinematographer, returns to photograph this one. It continues the sickly green and washed-out grey color palette that characterizes Wan's work up to this point. In its last act, increasingly frantic camera movements – akin to the shock metal music video style editing that characterized “Saw” – put in a few token appearances. The bloody stumps and mangled bodies have been left behind but the same visual quirks are very much present.

“Insidious'” sense of self-seriousness is present in most of its performances. Patrick Wilson and Rose Bryne do fine in the early scenes, projecting enough warmth for you to buy them as loving parents and a happy couple. However, as the material grows more ridiculous, it becomes more difficult to recognize their behavior as those of human beings. Genre stalwart Lin Shaye appears as Elise and it's nice to see her with a bigger role. She's probably the most adapt member in the cast at making the script's pseudo-scientific trash believable. Leigh Whannell himself and Angus Sampson as her sidekicks contribute a little bit of comic relief, something the film desperately needed more of. 

With a score of skittering ambiance and shrieking strings from Joseph Bishara, “Insidious” set out to be a scary movie for a mass audience. It must have worked, considering the box office receipts and several sequels it generated. I suppose people flocked to the movie, threw their popcorn up into the air, squealed with delight at the jump scares, and left wanting to know more about its belabored backstory. There is technical skill on display in “Insidious” that I can admire. Wan and his teams know the notes to play but they don't seem to have a grip on – if you'll excuse the pun – the spirit of the thing. Not that the majority of people agree with me, as “Insidious” is widely accepted among many as a modern horror classic. I guess, by some measure, ghost movies are preferable to overly slick remakes, floppy found footage flicks, and same-y torture horror. I guess. [Grade: C+]

RECENT WATCHES: Saw 3D (2010)

"Saw VI" grossed only 69.8 million at the global box office. Still a healthy profit against its 11 million dollar budget but a considerable drop from prior films, part six remaining the lowest grossing non-pandemic era entry in the series. A few factors could be considered for why that is. Maybe part five kind of sucking had less people turning out for six. Maybe the yearly release schedule left the creative team burned out and audiences' appetite for gore finally satisfied. The sixth film was topped opening weekend by "Paranormal Activity 2," suggesting that a new horror franchise had stolen Jigsaw's title as the box office champ of Halloween. Whatever the reason, Twisted Pictures decided they better wrap it up while some sort of demand still existed. The release of "Avatar" the year before had officially kicked off the modern 3D fad, giving the franchise some other coat tails to ride. "Saw 3D" would launch traps and giblets at theater goers in 2010, the additional promise of being the concluding installment in the story giving it another gimmick to draw ticket buyers in. (Which was taken further when the film was released on flat DVDs under the hilariously presumptuous name of "Saw: The Final Chapter.") The tactic paid off, in terms of earnings, but few seemed to find this a satisfying end to the series. Like far too many horror hits, "Saw" seemed to be going out on a whimper and not a bang.

Jill, the widow of the late John Kramer, strapped unworthy apprentice Mark Hoffman into the reverse bear trap at the end of the last movie. The would-be Jigsaw survives and Jill turns herself in to the FBI, in hopes they can protect her. Now with nothing to lose, Hoffman goes on a roaring rampage of revenge, with Jill as his final target. He also takes aim at internal affairs agent Matt Gibson, an old colleague tasked with protecting Jill. Meanwhile, the games continue as Bobby Degan – who has falsely claimed to be a Jigsaw survivor to gain fame – is thrust into an actual series of traps, forced to try and rescue those that assisted his hoax from deadly contraptions.

Lionsgate had originally planned to split the so-called final "Saw" installment into two parts – another unfortunate cinematic fad of the time – before the mediocre box office for part six made them reduce it to one movie. This strikes me as odd, considering Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan's original master plan was supposedly a second trilogy spanning through the fourth, fifth, and sixth movies. Indeed, "Saw 3D" makes it clearer that this story could have easily wrapped up with Hoffman getting his head wrenched apart by the reverse bear trap. The only plot thread that truly remains to be resolved is Hoffman seeking revenge on Jill. This results in him stabbing his way through a police station, in a decidedly un-Jigsaw fashion. Once that plot anticlimactically wraps up, the film abruptly ends with the entrance of another character that barely misses qualifying as a deus ex machina. The sequel hastily introduces Agent Gibson to give Hoffman someone else to scheme against. I honestly wondered if this guy might have been an established personality from the previous films, given the "Saw's" series habit of expanding on minor characters from past movies. Nope, this is Agent Gibson's first and last appearance in the "Saw" universe, another guy Hoffman has a years long grudge against despite him never being mentioned before now. That subplot is also resolved bluntly and without much fanfare. 

All of "Saw 3D" reeks of this feeling, of simply wanting to be done with it. The formula – of a chosen asshole being forced to decide the fate of captured victims, running parallel to the Jigsaw soap opera– is maintained. However, the disconnect between Hoffman's storyline and Bobby Degan's trial comes across as massive. You never get the impression that Hoffman is particularly interested in this game nor does it have much effect on the rest of the plot. Truthfully, the scenario pushes "Saw" into preposterous territory. Some of the traps are so elaborate and big – such as a CGI brazen bull building itself around a woman – that you wonder how any one person could afford to build and assemble it by themselves. Much less a serial killer who is on the run from the law through the entire movie. If a "Saw" movie leaves you asking the question "Wait, when did he have the time and resources to set all that up?," something has gone seriously wrong.

The film is repeatedly pulled between this general lack of ideas and energy and a desire to be the biggest, craziest "Saw" yet. The results come across as more desperate to be intense and shocking than actually upsetting. An opening trap – of a woman descending towards her boyfriends fighting over a table saw – takes place in a public square, once again making you wonder how that was pulled off in-universe. Meanwhile, the sequence ends up feeling uncomfortably sexist. A group of Neo-Nazis suspended in and around a speeding car is similarly mean-spirited in its ferocity while seeming so elaborate as to strain believability. These complex gags of death stand in contrast to the actual "game" once it gets going, which consists mostly of people in contraptions that impale them on spikes. In other words, it sure felt like the "Saw" team had run out of good ideas for death machines that are creativity gruesome and feature the trademark ironic punishment element of Jigsaw's schemes. Which has been all but abandoned by this point, as you're never quite sure what point exactly the engineer is trying to prove here.

As the last dying gasp of "torture porn" as a popular subgenre, "Saw 3D" represents the supposed goal of the style being all but abandoned. The highly realistic gore effects, in service of pushing the horror genre to extreme new heights, have given way to more rubbery looking violence. This is exacerbated by the sequel being in 3D. Obviously, that leads to bladed devices being jabbed towards the viewer and bloody meat spurting through the air. Both such scenarios play out in a nightmare sequence, a totally gratuitous moment included simply to shove another murder scene into the film. Such a theatrical presentation inevitably bends towards camp. However, "Saw" would be remised if it didn't maintain its trademark mood of taking its own ridiculous bullshit with utmost seriousness. This creates a mean-spirited atmosphere, most evident in when we finally see the reverse bear trap work as intended. Shattered teeth and bloody threads of flesh are tossed at the viewer, a desperate attempt to shock or impress that comes off as feeling more than a little sweaty. 

A better movie would embrace this undercurrent of humor. Honestly, I almost wonder if "Saw 3D" was trying to do that. The idea of a support group for survivors of Jigsaw's deadly games, that there are enough of them now to support such a venture, feels like an especially dark "Saturday Night Live" sketch. The scenes devoted to this set-up almost move towards comedy, as the past victims debate whether Jigsaw was a monster or a genius who saved their lives. The answer to that question seems self-evident but "Saw 3D" seems to have unironically embraced the idea of John Kramer as some sort of well-intentioned cult leader. So totally bereft of ideas, Dunstan and Melton incorporated an extremely popular fan theory of the time into "Saw 3D," that a character unseen since part one is not only still alive but willingly became another of Jigsaw's apprentices. I like Tobin Bell too but playing Kramer as this irresistibly magnetic, quasi-cult leader who brainwashes people into following his inconsistent philosophy – which the sequel presents as better than Hoffman's revenge driven methods – is baffling. John Kramer sure did a lot of revenge too! It's a twist that makes no sense, moving towards an ending that is nothing but an act of shallow fan service. 

That is ultimately all "Saw 3D" has to offer. Having exhausted all other ideas, the sequel represents the series spiraling towards a hashed together resolution of its own melodramas and a couple of attempts to goose the audience with familiar faces or bloody special effects. I definitely recall at least a few "Saw"-heads loving that final twist at the time. Unless you are thoroughly invested in the series' mythology, you're unlikely to get much out of the film. Greutert and his team trot out the same old visual quirks and musical cues but any effect they once had has long since worn out. "Saw VI" showed that incorporating some social satire and more chances for Bell to ham it up could've kept this series rolling for a while. Instead, "Saw 3D" has the horror franchise chasing its own tail on the way to a thoroughly underwhelming ending. After seven years, it was time to wrap the game up. [4/10]

RECENT WATCHES: Saw VI (2009)

The common wisdom is that the first entry in a long-running horror series is some sort of critically acclaimed genre classic while the endless sequels were increasingly derided by the mainstream press as nothing but senseless gore. This is sometimes true but I was actively reading a lot of critics in the 2000s and recall the original "Saw" as being considered pretty dumb by most professionals even then. Once the moral panic around "torture porn" kicked in, the yearly "Saw" sequels became an excuse for writers to clutch their pearls and search their thesaurus for as many synonyms for "mindless drivel" as they could find. That was certainly the case by the time we got to "Saw VI," which Liongates did not bother to screen for critics. However, to considerably surprise, the sixth film actually received some better notices than the previous sequels by incorporating some social commentary into its explicit violence. The installment is also beloved by fans, with many considering it a late-in-the-series highlight for a franchise that was terribly close to being totally wrung out by this point.

With the FBI agent on his tail dispatched, Mark Hoffman has officially established himself as the successor to the mantle of the Jigsaw Killer. He tries and frames his dead nemesis for his crimes while harassing John Kramer's widow, Jill, for hints about the latest game. Director Erickson and Agent Perez – who survived her encounter with an exploding Billy the Puppet doll in part four – are quickly putting the pieces together about Hoffman's deception. Meanwhile, Jigsaw's most elaborate game is getting underway. William Easton, the health insurance executive who denied John's policy, awakens in a labyrinth. His colleagues are strung up in fatal devices that will force Easton to confront the life and death decisions he makes every day up close, as he moves towards rescuing his family in the maze's center.

As I remember it, horror fans were very receptive to the annual tradition of new "Saw" movies. I seem to recall posters on the Bloody Disgusting and MovieManiac.net forums enthusiastically accepting Hoffman as the new Jigsaw. This is funny as the sequels themselves increasingly seem to regard him as unworthy of this legacy. Maybe the clear gulf in charisma between Tobin Bell and Costas Mandylor was more evident to the producers. Either way, "Saw VI" agrees that Mark Hoffman sucks. While John Kramer kept the authorities fumbling around in the dark for years, Hoffman seems to have screwed up by the start of his second "game." Rather than attempting to teach people the value of their own lives and push their will to survive to the limit, Hoffman acts more directly as a vigilante punishing criminals. More pressingly, Hoffman is using the Jigsaw identity to destroy his enemies, get revenge, and get himself promoted at work. Incoherent and contradictory as his philosophy was, John Kramer was a fanatic with a mission and a point to make. Hoffman is a self-interested bully, a power-hungry supervillain, and kind of an idiot who has given himself a lofty, unearned sense of superiority. 

Saying this engineer of sadistic torment machines is morally sounder than this other torture master is ridiculous, of course. While the initial hook of the "Saw" series was that Jigsaw's justification for his crimes were unreasonable, the sequels have aligned himself more and more with his twisted mission. Now, in this pitch black moral universe, we are rooting for one serial killer to fail to confirm himself as the heir to another serial killer's title. I have to wonder if this isn't Kevin Greutert – promoted from editor to director – making some sort of commentary on the different audiences for these movies. Is he comparing the gore hounds who show up every October merely to see more elaborate methods of mutilation to Hoffman, who uses Jigsaw's games for selfish or petty purposes? As opposed to those that actually engage with the twisted lessons John Kramer was trying to teach his victims? Horror villains becoming fan favorites is basically impossible to avoid but Jigsaw becoming an antihero this admired suggest somebody's wires got crossed along the way. Or maybe this is Twisted Pictures throwing shade at the other "torture porn" films that imitated "Saw" and deeming them unworthy. Whatever the purpose, "Saw VI" is clearly distinguishing one type of bloody maiming as holier than the other. 

Whether this was intentional or not is debatable but "Saw VI" clearly does have weightier ideas on its mind. The sequel came out five months before President Obama signed the Affordable Healthcare Act into law, prompting unfounded fear mongering from the right-wing noise machine and endless debate about how healthcare is distributed in America. A humble horror sequel has no deep reflections on this but clearly communicates one message: Health insurance workers are fucking assholes. Jigsaw turns his wrath on the executives and pencil pushers who cynically decide who lives and who dies, forcing them into grisly challenges as a metaphor for their own corporate greed and lack of empathy. Literally, as Jigsaw has Easton decided whether a healthy young man with no family is more worthy of life than a woman with pre-existing conditions and several kids. In this current era, where Luigi Manigone can become a folk hero overnight for capping the CEO of UnitedHealthcate, it's not hard to be on Jigsaw's side here. The sequel's most stirring moment isn't any of its brutal gore sequences. Instead, it's when Tobin Bell goes on a fiery rant about the callousness of insurance companies, ending by directly comparing them to predatory fish. 

Taking target at the kind of real life villains that probably do deserve some torturous lessons in humanity brings something back to the "Saw" series that hasn't been present since the second film. There's a kind of joyful ridiculousness to the grim traps that are thought up this. A Billy the Puppet doll swings towards a glass window, as if the protagonist is venturing through a jump scare filled haunted attraction. The central set piece of the film involves people tied to a rotating platform with a shotgun pointed at it, a very silly set-up that actively invites the comparison to a carnival spectacle. While the traps in the last two movies could get a little too conceptual at times, Greutert cuts the scenarios down here. Having to chop off a literal pound of flesh or navigate a corridor full of spewing steam are straight forward enough concepts. The climatic murder device is so over-the-top that it pushes "Saw," for the first time, almost into the realm of campy gore comedy. It's not only CEOs and insurance agents that are punished here but also some predatory lenders and a gossip magazine columnist, all played as thoroughly despicable characters by leaning on overwrought emotion. 

Not that this was an intentional move on "Saw VI's" behalf. As always, these movies take themselves very serious. The degree of continuity between sequels and the number of past events to keep track of remain dense. Whenever "Saw VI" focuses on Jill trying to fulfill her husband's twisted plans or Hoffman's manipulative tactics, we've definitely reached soap opera territory. The level of melodrama, when added to the grim subject matter, does result in the first decent twist ending in a while and a finale that puts a novel spin on one of the classic "Saw" gimmicks. Greutert sticks to the hyper-grim visual palette that has been long established by now. Admittedly, the spastic montages and dingy lighting aren't utilized quite as much, these visual clichés starting to fall out of popularity by 2009. 

Honestly, one has to wonder if Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures themselves weren't aware of how silly this series was starting to get. Before "Saw VI" went before cameras, there was an accompanying VH1 reality show entitled "Scream Queens," in which the winner got to be a special guest victim in the sequel. Competing to be graphically tortured in a horror movie strikes me as a weird premise for a game show but I guess that was the state of both the horror and reality TV genres at the time. (The winner, by the way, was Tanedra Howard, who does a decent job of hacking her own arm off in the opening trap.) Whether "Saw VI" knowingly started to embrace the overly edgy element of the series for humor or at least incorporate a tiny bit of social relevance, it did inject some energy into a horror series that was starting to run its course. [7/10]

RECENT WATCHES: Fast & Furious (2009)

“The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift” was still a box office success but it grossed one hundred million dollars less than its predecessor. Normally, this would simply mean the end of the series. In a Hollywood landscape more obsessed with on-going sagas than ever, Universal wasn't ready to give up. Instead, Vin Diesel would finally be talked into making a proper return to the role of Dom Torreto. This essentially made “Fast & Furious,” the fourth entry in the franchise, the first real sequel to the original. Justin Lin would be retained as director from “Tokyo Drift,” turning the car-centric franchise into a bigger, more international affair that more-or-less rebooted the series into a totally different type of blockbuster. 

Dom is up to his old tricks again, pulling off daring freeway heist with his gang in the Dominican Republic. After an especially dangerous stunt, he decides to go his separate ways from his long-time lover Letty. Shortly afterwards, she's seemingly killed, sending Dom on a roaring rampage of revenge. Meanwhile, re-instated FBI agent Brian O'Conner is on the trail of notorious drug lord, Braga. It's not long before Dom and Brian cross paths again, both ending up competing to become drivers for Braga. The two foes-turned-friends-turned-foes again must team-up to avenge Letty and take down the bad guy, on a quest that will take them all over North and Central America.

The change in priories represented by “Fast & Furious” is evident in one very big way: There's less focus on the cars. Oh, sure, there's still an extended race sequence and lots of vehicular mayhem. Driving cars fast is still the main characters' superpowers. The lack of lingering close-ups on shiny chrome and polished hubs shows that the fourth film was designed to be less of a car movie and more of a general action/adventure flick. You also see this in the story structure. Dom Toretto is centered in a standard revenge narrative, that sees him fighting off a drug cartel via punching, shooting, and explosions. The way Dom and Brian's adventure takes them all over Central America, in pursuit of a colorful bad guy, also can't help but be a little reminiscent of a James Bond flick. If the first three “Fast” flicks were somewhat trendy movies meant to capitalize on the early 2000's fascination with street racing, “Fast & Furious” clearly sought to push the franchise forward into a more generalized action movie direction. 

By this point in their careers, Vin Diesel and Paul Walker were much more established talents. With an extra seven years on the silver screen, both are more assured in their performances and on-screen personas. Walker's introductory scene has him chasing a perp through a building, before both go sailing out a window onto a parked vehicle. His shows that Brian O'Connor is a more grizzled, experienced agent by this point. The older, more stubbly Walker fits into that role well, following expanding the character pass his dude-bro roots. Vin, meanwhile, has gotten more monstrously jacked since the first film. This furthers his transformation into a superhuman action hero, who threatens to crush random goons with engine blocks and tosses bad guys through car doors. This sphere of Schwarzeneggerian excess is exactly where someone like Diesel excels. 

Fittingly, the action here goes from the merely preposterous to utterly cartoonish. The opening freeway heist has Dom and his team jacking a truck along a perilous mountain road, a reasonable event by this series' measure. It ends with Dom rocketing his car underneath a flaming tanker as it rolls down the hill. The level of CGI effects work necessary to pull off such an elevated stunt is high, lending a degree of unreality to events early on. It is a bit of a shock to go from the more grounded stunt work in “Tokyo Drift” to the Marvel movie style mayhem here. Probably the moment that best balances this push-and-pull between an ostensibly realistic setting and utterly absurd action is a street race midway through the film. There's some cool stunt driving, weaving in and out of traffic, and more than a few over-the-top wrecks. 

Honestly, I found myself wondering throughout “Fast & Furious” if this kind of elevated action suited the series, at least as it existed up to this point. I found myself missing the more practical stunt driving that was the highlights of the first and third films. Yet, by the time “Fast & Furious” reaches its climatic chase, I was won over by it. That particular sequence is a claustrophobic race through a series of underground tunnels along the Mexican border, which is tensely directed by Justin Lin. The tight surroundings and speeding cars causes the suspense to ratchet up and leads to a few inventive set pieces. The sequence then climaxes with a moment so supremely silly – I wasn't kidding when I said that fast cars were Dom's superpower now – that I couldn't help but love it. 

By moving the story outside the realm of street racing, “Fast & Furious” finally graduates this franchise from totally predictable half-assed scripts to more standard blockbuster screenwriting. This does not mean the film leaves the melodrama of the first three installments behind. By putting them on opposite sides of the law again, Dom and Brian's rivalry is still centered in the story, now with the extra layer of betrayal. This climaxes during a wonderfully ridiculous wrestling match between the two, during which Vin slams Walker through a pantry. Naturally, Diesel seeking revenge for his murdered wife is exactly the kind of macho fantasy movies like this cater too. That includes a gorgeous new woman throwing herself at him – a pre-”Wonder Woman” Gal Gadot – that he naturally rebuffs. For what it's worth, there is a semi-decent twist concerning who the actual villain is, which shows more thought was definitely put into this one.

It seems safe to consider “Fast & Furious” a transitional film for this particular series. From here, these movies would go further over-the-top, as opposed to the doofy but basically earth-bounded earlier entries. This naturally tracks with the “Fast” films morphing from nothing but car porn to bigger budget action-fests intended for a more general audience. There's definitely some bumps along the way but, by the end, I found myself on the same page as this ridiculous spectacle. [7/10]

RECENT WATCHES: Saw V (2008)

One of the taglines used to sell “Saw IV” was, simply, “If it's Halloween, then it must be Saw.” There's no doubt that part of what made the grisly series such a reliable box office presence in the 2000s was the yearly ritual of a new one being in theaters in time for Halloween every October. Horror fans loved having a new gore-fest to watch during their favorite holiday and I bet the average movie-goer appreciated it too, for a while anyway. To maintain that consistent schedule, Twisted Pictures was basically working on “Saw” non-stop. Melton and Dunstan envisioned part four launching a new story arc to run through the next two installments. Once the opening weekend numbers came in, it was full-speed ahead on “Saw V.” A script was locked by Christmas, with filming taking place through March and April, with the finished product ready to go by October. David Hackl, the production designer who almost helmed four, was now leading this bloody machine. At a certain point, however, the question must be asked: Does cranking a sequel out so quickly produce compelling results?

In the aftermath of Jigsaw's reign of terror, there are seemingly few survivors... Except for Detective Eric Hoffman, who is quickly praised as the hero who broke the case. This is all by design, as Hoffman was one of John Kramer's disciples and the man who will inherit the mantle of Jigsaw. The only person who suspects anything is FBI agent Strahm. He was supposed to die too but survived the trap he was placed in. He starts digging through Hoffman's past, discovering that the detective killed his sister's murderer and staged it to look like one of Jigsaw's "games." When John Kramer discovered this, he took Hoffman under his wing. As Strahm closes in on the new Jigsaw Killer, another game – involving five people connected by shady property deals – is playing out. 

Part of why Wan and Whannell's original "Saw" spawned so many sequels and imitators is because it presented an easily copied blueprint. Not only in its premise of gruesome torture games but also in its visual style. In his sequels, Darren Lynn Bousman did little to change the dank settings, gritty lighting, and frantic editing that the first film established. "Saw V" keeps the same cinematographer and editor that have stuck with the series from the beginning, so it features plenty of the trademark "Saw" ugliness. The expected jagged camera movements, "Jacob's Ladder" style freak-outs, and Nickelodeon slime lighting are all present and accounted for. However, David Mackl shows notably different influences than Wan and Bousman. "Saw V" opens with someone being cleaved in two by a swinging pendulum. One Edgar Allen Poe references deserves another, as the film ends with someone crushed between two advancing walls in a shrinking room. This suggest more of a gothic horror vibe, which is also evident in part five starting on a dark and stormy night. The underground tunnels and industrial warehouses are lit like dusty, dark castles and the blood is noticeably a brighter red than last time. I couldn't shake the feeling throughout that "Saw V" was going for some Hammer horror or Corman's Poe Cycle vibes. 

Embracing a more baroque fashion of horror like that than reheated "Seven" would've been a good way to keep "Saw" fresh this late into the series. Unfortunately, the fast-paced production cycle for this franchise resembled TV more than anything. Which is also what "Saw V" resembles. Not only in its flatly shot and presented scenes of cops and FBI agents lurking around stations and crime scenes either. Special Agent Strahm is more-or-less the hero of "Saw V," from the moment he saves himself from drowning via improvised tracheotomy. That causes Scott Patterson to put on an even gruffer voice than he did last time, making the already hard-boiled detective into more of a case-obsessed hard-ass. It's easy to imagine this same actor and character starring in some CBS cop show. Strahm has the same degree of depth that implies too, being a totally indistinct tough guy who exists to uncover all the clues that will reveal the story to the audience. 

This is because, like a serialized television story, "Saw V" is far too invested in its ongoing lore to make this installment stand alone. Jigsaw is the real protagonist of the "Saw" series anyway and Hoffman is our new Jigsaw. Much of the sequel is devoted to flashbacks, showing how and why Hoffman became John Kramer's other protégé and how he helped set up many of the traps from the first two movies. This allows Tobin Bell to remain present in the series, despite his character being dead by now. There's a problem however. Bell was already a veteran character actor before becoming a horror icon. He knew how to command the screen with a gravelly, Lance Henriksen-esque charisma. Hoffman is played Costas Mandylor, whose C.V. is, I guess, not any more or less distinguished than Bell's. However, his performance comes off as a lot more one-note. As incoherent as John Kramer's philosophy was, it was still something that made him different than the slashers and supervillains that came before. His games of torture were twisted tests of character, meant to show if his captives had a will to survive. Mark Hoffman, meanwhile, is your run-of-the-mill asshole vigilante. His victims include a Neo-Nazi, an asshole land developer, a rich junkie, a tabloid reporter, a low level government crony. The kind of people you won't mind seeing dismembered, continuing the antihero-ification of Jigsaw that started last time. Moreover, Kramer being driven by his cancer diagnosis and perverse desire to prove a willingness to live was interesting. It showed a bizarre world view, elaborated on through the previous film's backstory, and given life by Bell. Hoffman has none of that and the sequel never truly justifies why he is so eager to take up the Jigsaw mantle. Mandylor's performance, meanwhile, is grunting and sinister and gives us little in the way of any sort of inner life. 

"Saw V" is truly all about establishing the new central baddie for the series going forward. Dunstan and Melton's script uses the fanfiction-like device to make us think the new guy is important by inserting him into past events, to convince us he's been here all along. That means tying "Saw V" to the previous installments, leading to revisits of past traps and an almost amusing rundown of all the dead cops Jigsaw has left in his wake. (It also means completely brushing away the cliffhanger ending we've been waiting two movies to see resolved.) However, "Saw V" devoting so much time and energy to establishing its new killer presents a serious flaw: Aren't these movies supposed to be about normal people trapped in games of mutilation and execution? 

Jigsaw's latest "game," with all its bloody traps, is shoved into the subplot of the film. The group of people forced to play or die are all largely unlikable. Their story, a convoluted and totally off-screen tale of shady property deals, is uninvolving. The cast plays the gang as self-interested and melodramatic assholes. Considering the obvious attraction of these films are the gory death traps, those seem uninspired too. A system of pulleys yanking an unlucky loser into a guillotine blade is clever. However, the other tests feel like ultra-violent "Double Dare" challenges, concluding in unexciting dispatches like an explosion or electrocution. The intended goal of this game is to make all these selfish jerk-wads realize they need to forge meaningful connections with other people and put aside their greedy self-interest to survive. Considering the extremely cynical world-view of the "Saw" series, how this plays out should come as no surprise. 

If the biggest problem facing "Saw IV" was the series being consumed by its own continuity and need for plot twist, part five shows a similar self-absorption with the backstory of this gory crime saga. To the point that it has officially overtaken the bloody challenges as the primary focus. I guess that's better than wallowing in sadism and nihilism, though it's also a lot harder to care about. At least part five skips the timeline scrambling twist ending antics. In fact, "Saw V's" ending feels rather routine, a half-hearted promise that the story will continue in next year's installment and that Jigsaw's sick trials are far from over. I suppose the sequel gave fans what they wanted, as it was another reliable money maker for its producers. However, the feeling that extending this story past the original villain's death was maybe a fool's errand is starting to sink in. "Saw V" isn't totally without its moment, I guess. Bell is still doing a lot with a little and the opening and closing death scenes are grimly executed. However, the franchise doldrums are setting in. [5/10]

RECENT WATCHES: Saw IV (2007)

Jigsaw was dead. However, “Saw III” grossed 164 million dollars at the global box office, meaning “Saw: The Franchise” was very much alive. James Wan and Leigh Whannell were ready to hang up their bloody hacksaws, stepping into the roles of executive producers. Liongates set out to find a new writing duo to keep their yearly torture machine chugging along. A spec script by Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan – the team behind Dimension's ill-fated “Feast” – was briefly considered as the blueprint for a “Saw” prequel. However, the decision was made to move forward, rather than backwards. Besides, what horror villain worth their salt hasn't come back from the dead? Thus, “Saw IV” was set in motion. Production designer for the last two films, David Hackl, was the first choice to direct but dropped out for personal reasons. Darren Lynn Bousman wasn't interested in directing at first, fearful of being pigeon-holed as a horror sequel guy, but they talked him into it. (Probably because he was trying to fund his weirdo passion project, “Repo! The Genetic Opera,” which Twisted Pictures ended up producing and Liongates distributed.) In many ways, as John Kramer himself would say, the games were only beginning. 

In the autopsy room, a cassette tape is pulled out of the stomach of the deceased John Kramer, promising that his plans will continue after his death. FBI agents Strahm and Perez are assigned to the case, quickly deducing that the sickly Kramer must have had multiple assistants helping set up his torture machines. Meanwhile, SWAT team leader Rigg – obsessing over the Jigsaw case since Detective Kerry's death – is drawn into a new game. He must complete tests that see him encountering criminal faces from his past. At the end of the trail, is Detective Matthews and forensic specialist Hoffman in a trap of their own. Strahm becomes increasingly convinced Riggs is the assistant they are seeking, on his trail in hopes of rescuing the captured Hoffman and Matthews. 

If any franchise runs long enough, it inevitably reaches a point where the story becomes consumed by its own mythology. You're going to get installments that reference previous installments, if they aren't built entirely around remaking them. Part four represents that turning point for "Saw," when the franchise disappeared up its own ass. You have to remember who the – not that distinctive, it must be said – various cops and detectives from the last two movies were to make sense of this one's story. The plot juggles several competing threads, all of which are playing out at the same time as each other... While also occurring alongside a number of flashbacks. That's before the last act twist, the utterly self-involved reveal that "Saw IV" is taking place at the same time as the events of "Saw III," the two films crashing into each other in their final minutes. Part three's ineffectual protagonist, Jeff, wanders into this sequel with the expectation that you'll immediately recognize him. This means that part four frustratingly does not resolve the previous film's cliffhanger. "Saw IV" is so wrapped up in its narrative trickery and dependency on continuity, that the eventual reveal of John Kramer's true heir comes off more as a shrug than a perfectly executed surprise. 

Honestly, it's a lot to ask of the audience for films that aren't much more than especially nasty, elaborate slasher films. If Dustan and Melton were hoping to elevate the series beyond that, they don't resist another tradition of a long-running slasher series. The normal people in these stories usually end up dead, defined more by their deaths than their personalities because each sequel must be bloodier than the last. Jason, Freddy, and their murderous brethren become the main attraction for the audience. If we are here to see the killers off folks, might as well make the victims obnoxious or dumb, to make it easier to root for their inevitable destruction. In the first two films, John Kramer mostly stuck people with common problems or who had made simple mistakes into his deadly games. If you thought it was fucked-up that Jigsaw targeted addicts or people with depression, that's cause it was. We were supposed to place ourselves in such a scenario, targeted by a lunatic for a "crime" that exists only in their head. However, the need to make every "Saw" more fucked-up than the last invites anticipation on the viewers' behalf. The horror fans want to see the blood and guts and mutilation, right? With every sequel, the chances of Jigsaw becoming a twisted anti-hero of sorts increased. 

"Saw IV" represents Wan and Whannell's creation reaching that quantum of sadism. This time, the people placed into Jigsaw's contraptions of agony include a dirty lawyer, a sex trafficker, a serial rapist, an abusive husband, and a crooked cop. It's hard to be upset when such people gouge their eyes out, get their limbs ripped off, have their scalps torn away by grinding gears, are run through with metal spikes, or crushed by giant blocks of ice. It is much easier to read such events as a twisted form of justice, these people getting what they deserve. Which undermines the entire point of the series, confuses what exactly the point of Jigsaw's machinations are here, and makes it harder to care if any of these folks live or die. It also means the audience gets a hall pass on finding the excessive gore and creative torture implements entertaining, driving away the potentially confrontational aspect of these movies. "Saw IV" is the fictionalized extrapolation of French peasants watching loyalists get guillotined and just as morally justifiable. Maybe Ebert was on to something when he compared "dead teenager movies" to carnival geek shows. Who goes to the geek show and feels bad for the chickens? 

Since "Saw IV" isn't even pretending to have us sympathize with the unfortunate people strapped in the torture machines, the role of protagonist is placed on an outside observer. As in part three, a random guy must run through the gauntlet of death, choosing whether to help the imprisoned victims or simply sit back and watch. Rigg, played by a very sweaty and serious Lyriq Bent, is at least less of a dispassionate observer than "Saw III's" Jeff. With the exception of the serial rapist – who he actually helps strap into the dismemberment machine – he at least tries to help people before they are torn apart. He's just kind of an idiot, who repeatedly barges into scenarios long past the point when he should have learned not to do that. The script also takes it for granted that he cares about rescuing Donnie Wahlberg's Detective Matthews, long since established as an asshole. Similarly, we are definitely suppose to relate to Agent Strahm's belligerent, blustery quest to unravel Jigsaw's plan. Which he intends to do largely by interrogating Kramer's widow. It's difficult to assign any sort of A.C.A.B. subtext to these plot threads but who knows. Whether the latter narrative does anything for you might depend on if you think there's any novelty in seeing "Gilmore Girls'" Scott Patterson or "Cheerleader Camp's" Betsy Russell in a movie like this. 

Russell – whose performance is better than Patterson's, who goes way too grouchy – is part of the one element of "Saw IV" that actually makes it a somewhat interesting film. As I said, "Saw IV" was almost a prequel, the script that became "The Collector" nearly serving as its blue print. Part four pushes the story forward but is still a prequel of sorts. Tobin Bell is guaranteed a paycheck thanks to extensive flashbacks to John Kramer's life in the time leading up to him becoming Jigsaw. This is a good move, largely because Bell is a compelling presence who is given juicy material to enact. Seeing what made a high successful engineer and toymaker into a sadistic quasi-serial killer is a transformation worth watching. The path "Saw IV" lays down is heavy-handed. A contrived scenario involving his wife's work at a clinic, a botched robbery, and an aborted fetus is specifically planned out to create Jigsaw as we know him, the screenwriters clearly working backwards from the conclusion we already have. These scenes also establish John Kramer as a big ol' hypocrite, his first "game" proving that this was always about revenge for him. (How intentional that is depends on how much credit you're willing to give the people who make these movies.) Still, it's more interesting than the convoluted on-going plot. The sequel even provides an explanation for Jigsaw's weird obsession with pig heads.

From what he's said in the topic, you get the impression that Darren Lynn Bousman had consigned himself to simply delivering fans the bloodshed they've come to expect by the time he made "Saw IV." The film opens with a graphic, extended autopsy sequence, seemingly an admission of sorts that we are only here for the gory special effects. The arm-ripping trap strikes me as similarly uninspired. The wife speared to her abusive husband and forced to either kill him or save herself is almost clever. I do kind of like the scalping machine, because it plays on fears of getting your hair caught in industrial machinery. Bousman's juvenile visual edginess does seem to have relaxed a little. "Saw IV" isn't as ugly as the previous two films, featuring less toxic waste green lighting. The Nu-Metal montages of people screaming while the camera swirls around them and the flashing lights as transitions are still here. There is a neat moment though, when a body tossed through a mirror leads us right into a flashback. Maybe this guy has some talent after all...

Ultimately, you're probably only watching "Saw IV" if you are a fan of this kind of thing or if you are the kind of person who watches every entry in a horror series after they've watched the first. Guess which one I am! Both audiences, admittedly, are exactly the kind of people who can keep track of plot points this unnecessarily dense. "Saw IV" filled me with less loathing towards the human race than the third but still falls short of the camp of the second or whatever genuine merits the first had. The series devoting itself to insular continuity, instead of merely having fun with ever-more improbable death machines, would eventually be its undoing. Lionsgate still got 139 million in box office, against a mere ten million budget, meaning the sequel did exactly what it was designed to do: Find a way to keep the money train rolling. And Bousman got to make his weird musical about live organ donation – which I kind of like – so the only losers were the people who stupidly expect something different from the fourth "Saw" movie. I do like the flashbacks centered on Bell and will admit some of the cruelty on display is creative. Whether that is enough to get me through the next six entries remains to be seen... [6/10]

Director Report Card: James Wan (2007) - Part Two

3. Death Sentence

In 1972, prolific author of crime thrillers and westerns Brian Garfield would publish a novel entitled “Death Wish.” The story of a pacifist accountant who becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered and his daughter is assaulted by home invaders, it was a searing tale about how vengeance is useless, violence degrades everyone, and crime is a problem that can't be solved with a bullet. Not a best seller at first, “Death Wish” did win positive enough reviews to catch Hollywood's attention. Sidney Lumet was originally attached to direct and he wanted Jack Lemmon to star. Instead, the movie ended up being made by outspoken conservative Michael Winner and starred action hero Charles Bronson. Unsurprisingly, the resulting film did not reflect the anti-violent message of Garfield's book. In fact, it came across basically as a pro-vigilante film. That didn't stop “Death Wish” from becoming a box office success. An influential one too, eventually spawning four increasingly outlandish sequels and a whole slew of imitators about family men taking justice into their own hands. 

Brian Garfield was not too pleased about this. In 1975, he would write a sequel to his book called “Death Sentence,” seeking to reiterate his themes and dismiss the film adaptation's ideas about cowboy justice. The damage had been done by that point, however. The words “Death Wish” would always be associated with hyper-violent action shlock about avenging fathers with more than slightly racist undertones. James Wan was certainly aware of the Charles Bronson movies, as they had long since become cult favorites. Upon reading Garfield's novels, he became inspired to create a more faithful adaptation. He went so far as to invite Garfield to write the screenplay. Garfield's drafts were not used for “Death Sentence,” which ended up not resembling either of his novels much. It is notable, however, as Wan's first departure from the horror genre and his first movie not written by Leigh Whannell.

Nick Hume is a regular man with a humble office job. He loves his wife, Helen, and their two sons, Brendan and Lucas. Brendan is an aspiring athlete, considering attending university in Canada on a hockey scholarship. They stop at a gas station on the way home from school one night, when two armed thugs burst into the room. Brendan is killed by a man named Joe Darley, in order to initiate himself into his family's gang. Nick gets a good look at Joe's face, the police quickly arresting him. Upon learning that the killer will go away to prison for a few years at most, Nick willingly gives a testimony that lets Joe walk... Before hunting him down and, in a grief-fueled rage, killing him. Joe's gang quickly deduces that Nick is their brother's murderer and attacks the man. In the resulting confrontation, Nick kills another member of the gang. He soon finds himself the target of the Darley family, unleashing a chain reaction of violence that threatens everything he holds dear. 

"Death Sentence" is a movie that clearly wants to be about the futility of revenge. The thesis seems to be violence never brings justice, only destruction. After murdering Joe, Nick feels a momentary rush of joy. Shortly afterwards, he collapses in the shower, overwhelmed by remorse. He remains deeply paranoid about being found out, hiding a wound on his hand from his family and co-workers. Most obviously, his act of revenge only dooms him further. He kills the man who killed his boy, prompting that man's family to seek retaliation against Nick. This continues until he has lost everything. The idea is evident in the sequence most taken from Garfield's "Death Wish" novel, in which the criminals break into the Hume house and attempt to massacre the whole family. The murder of Nick's son was a senseless act but, trying to pay blood for blood, simply leads to yet more bloodshed. Moreover, in the finale, Nick has shaved his head and turned himself into a ruthless killer, prompting one of the crooks to point out that he's just like them now. His vigilante "justice" hasn't made things right, it's only turned him into something as bad as those he sought to punish. That's a revelation taken directly from Garfield's text.

That's the message "Death Sentence" wants to send and proclaims in unsubtle fashion several times. There's a problem, however. Wan's film depicts the Darley gang as cartoonish bad guys, with wild accents and lots of overcooked tough guy dialogue. In contrast, the Hume family is portrayed as loving and stereotypically wholesome. In the last act, the humble family man remakes himself into an action hero. He dons a leather jacket. He barks intimidating dialogue and muscles his way into bars. After a sequence in which he buys a bunch of guns – that luxuriates in the glory of the macho power of firearms – we get a thunderous montage of Nick loading his pistols and strapping up. By the time he's driving a muscle car through the front door of his enemies' lair, "Death Sentence" has become indistinguishable from the countless unironic vigilante flicks that followed in "Death Wish's" wake. The stated message of how revenge is bad and violence is self-destructive is seriously undermined when you joyfully depict your protagonist as a total bad-ass, as an avatar for the rage of every frustrated dad in the audience, guns as the righteous tools to deliver that vengeance, and his victims as bad guys that have it coming. 

There is one way "Death Sentence" might have been able to somewhat overcome the dissonance between what it says it's about and what it actually depicts. If the violence had been shown as realistic, as horribly uncomfortable for the viewer to watch as it is for the characters to experience. Considering Wan was coming from the cringe-inducing injuries of "Saw," you would think he could pull that off. You know things have gone wrong – and not only for our characters – when the criminals bust into the gas station and blow the attendant away in a massive spray of blood. Nick's eldest son then gets his throat slit with a machete, as if the gangsters were emulating Jason Voorhees. When Nick is fighting off the home invaders, there's an exciting stunt of him tackling a guy through the bannisters of the house. By the action hero finale, he's launching faceless goons across the room with shotgun blast, leaving huge gaping wounds in their chest. At one point, he blows a guy's leg off at the knee with some buckshot, the sort of gory spectacle that Jigsaw would employ against his captives. In other words, "Death Sentence" is taking too much joy in its violence. The film is directed not with a Peckenpah-ian sickening fascination with the mechanics of violence nor a mournful tone of how senseless this all is. Instead, Wan and his team think this shit is cool. 

The horror fanboy approach to the executions, the need to show off the creativity of the effects team by crafting "cool" gore, makes me wonder if I misread "Death Sentence." Is this, despite all its statements to the contrary, just another braindead vigilante flick? A mindless bit of Dads-ploitation about a middle-age man venting some righteous fury against unimportant crooks, as a cathartic way for the audience to unleash their own toxically-male desire to justifiably murder? At times, you get the impression that is exactly how Wan was approaching the material. Some of "Death Sentence's" best scenes are directed as a straight-forward thriller. When Nick seeks revenge on the man who killed his son, it's an exciting moment that makes good use of the claustrophobic setting by having the two men stumble around. A long one-take sequence is a chase through a parking garage, that climaxes in a genuinely clever and exciting stunt of a car rolling off the top floor. During the action-packed last act, when a sawed-off shotgun keeps blowing enormous and identical holes in the surrounding, I was wondering if I could enjoy this film simply as a goofy action movie. 

However, unavoidably, "Death Sentence" circles back to its own pretensions. Aisha Taylor has the thankless job of playing the police detective, aware of Nick's actions but lacking the evidence to arrest him, that appears to chastise the protagonist for his crimes. This is not the only time Nick is warned that he's starting down a path towards his own doom. In general, "Death Sentence" has a somber and serious tone. Multiple scenes are devoted to the family members crying and mourning for their dead boy, while an extremely on-the-nose song plays on the soundtrack. The film ends in an indecisive tonal place, that seems to both award Nick for his actions and consider them justified, while also leaving him a broken mess. (How broken depends on if you're watching the theatrical cut or director's cut, though the result is basically the same.) "Death Sentence" packs in over-the-top violence and action while also reminding us how bad this all is and putting its characters through misery. The result is a grim movie with a nihilistic tone. I suppose that does make you feel the futility of revenge but I don't think in the way the filmmaker intended. 

Another element that furthers the miserabilist mood of "Death Sentence" is its visual design. This was Wan's second film with the "Dead Silence" team of Leonetti and Knue, on photography and editing, but it actually resembles his debut more than his sophomore effort. The bleached lighting, grimy black and greys, and Lime Jolly Rancher green colors are back with a vengeance. A few times, the influence "Suspiria" and Bava has had on Wan is evident. There's some nicely foreboding reds in a few scenes. The action scenes are generally more controlled than usual but the film does fall into the spasmodic camera work and jittery editing of "Saw" several times. Most notably in the sequence where Nick awakens in the hospital, which does too good of a job of translating the character's disoriented mood to the viewer. In general, "Death Sentence" looks boring and ugly in the way a lot of horror and crime movies did in the 2000s. Everyone wanted to be Fincher and Romanek without studying what makes those guys' styles effective.

One must be forced to conclude that "Death Sentence" is, ya know, not very well written. John Goodman appears as the father of the crooks, putting on a bizarre Jersay accent and spiritedly spitting the script's most hard-boiled dialogue. He acknowledges that Nick is going to take his sons away from him, the same way his son took Nick's child from him. It's a nice bit of dramatic parallel that could have reinforced the uselessness of bloody revenge. Instead, the script throws that idea out there, has Goodman giving the murderer of his boy a weirdly understanding monologue, before disposing of the character in a way that only muddles the thematic waters further. The film wants it both ways. These bad guys are punks that deserve what's coming to him but also what our hero is doing shouldn't be emulated. (Though it does, the movie seems to think, look really cool.)

Another weird thing the film can't make up its mind about is what ethnicity the bad guys are. The "Death Wish" films can, charitably, be called "problematic" by having the creeps Bronson gunned down often be varying shades of brown. The films recalled, and reinforced, reactionary delusions about scary ethics coming to threaten the precious white family, raping and killing our wives and daughters. That cities are crime infested because they are also filled with people from different races and cultures. It was another way the films played into fantasies of good white men using good violence against bad foreigners. Wan seeks to avoid these racist undertones in "Death Sentence," by making the crooks Nick is after white people... Except when it doesn't. A lot of them speak Spanish. One of them is black. All-American Garrett Hedlund plays the eldest Darley brother but the shaved head and clothes they give him certainly recall the stereotypical image of a Latino gangbanger. When paired with the obvious working class roots of the Darley gang, and the Humes' more white collar background, the movie still invokes the same sort of racial divisions of the source material. 

What most holds "Death Sentence" together is a decent lead performance from Kevin Bacon. Bacon has, over the years, proven himself adept at playing both everyman leading men and scuzzy psychos, making him probably the ideal choice for this role. When playing an average family man who gets in way over his head, Bacon is quite good. He panics well and seems totally unprepared for what is happening but, at the same time, it's believable that he could be a threatening presence in a fight. He's also totally serviceable as an action hero in the last third. Unfortunately, the melodramatic streak in the script is something he can't convincingly play. Whenever the Nume family has to grieve, it always comes off as overdone and false. Since Kelly Preston as his wife has nothing to do in the story besides being sad about her dead kid and distraught partner, her performance is entirely made up of such theatrical notes. It's a good cast but, once again, they're let down by the confused script. 

"Dead Silence's" lacking script can be blamed on an admittedly exhausted writer and the studio insisting on doctoring up some scenes. I don't know if "Death Sentence" was vulnerable to a similarly rushed, pushy production. Its credited writer, Ian Mackenzie Jeffers, has only one other film of note: "The Grey," a similarly maudlin tale of manly grieving and bloody survival. So maybe this is simply his style. Released only three months after "Dead Silence" – one near the start of summer movie season, the other at the absolute ass-end on August 31st – Wan's third film grossed less at the box office and received equally bad reviews. (It probably didn't help that the two have similar sounding titles. They couldn't have found a name for this that wasn't a two word phrase that started with a variant of "Dead" and ended with a two-syllable S-word?) One person was pleased with "Death Sentence," however. Brian Garfield thought the gory violence was a bit much but said the adaptation respected the themes of his novels much more than previous adaptations. That is true. However, it turns out embracing the meat-headed tendencies of the material, Michael Winner style, leads to a more thematically coherent and entertaining movie than trying to be both a mournful meditation on the uselessness of revenge and a shoot-em-up action movie. [Grade: C]