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]