115 - Death Wish

    A well-behaved architect decides to take the law into his own hands after his wife and daughter are murdered/assaulted by a group of thugs.
    Charles Bronson’s Death Wish movies are a classic of 70’s culture.  But they’ve been difficult for me to find.  I never noticed them in my local video stores as I was growing up.  But I believe they were satirized in some of the MAD magazines I had.
    This is actually a pretty classy movie.  It’s not as complex as Ms. 45 was, but it’s a very delicate act.  There are lots of questions raised by this movie, and there aren’t any easy answers.  It’s easy to identify with the lead, but it’s also easy to feel like the police aren’t doing their job by letting him get away with it.
    What sells the movie is that he never seems out of control.  He decides what he has to do, and does it.  He doesn’t come across as premeditated, either.  He doesn’t plan out his kills, he just puts himself into the situation, and waits for the right moment.
    The most interesting element is that he never goes after the people who actually did him wrong.  He doesn’t know who they are, and he has no way of finding out.  The story would be very different if he knew, killed them, then decided to keep killing.
    There’s one hilarious detail in this movie.  After he kills his first mugger, we see a resulting front page headline on a newspaper:
EX CON KILLED
MOTIVE UNKNOWN