After many years of rumours about the notoriously troubled production of the Death Wish remake we finally got to see the first trailer for the film last week. The film has been in development since 2006 when it was first announced Sylvester Stallone was interested in remaking the ’70s vigilante action film. This version of the remake quickly ended when Stallone announced he had left the project over ‘creative differences’. After Stallone‘s exit the project went cold until 2012 when writer director Joe Carnahan became involved.
This version was to be the third collaboration between Carnahan and Liam Neeson who had previously collaborated on The A-Team and The Grey however this fell through as well. After this iteration of the project Gerardo Naranjo was brought on board with Benicio del Toro possibly starring but once again, nothing happened. Another four years passed before things finally got moving in June 2016 when director Eli Roth (Hostel) signed up with Bruce Willis attached to star as Paul Kersey.
Full disclosure, I am a big fan of Charles Bronson as well as a big fan of the original 1974 film which started the Death Wish franchise which went on to have a total of 5 films. The sad thing about the series is that they made too many of them and especially the last two films are laughably bad with the late great Charles Bronson looking completely unconvincing due to his advanced age (he was 72 by the time the fifth film came out).
The original film was an adaptation of a 1972 novel by Brian Garfield about an accountant (an architect in the film) named Paul Benjamin whose wife Esther and daughter Carol are horribly victimized during a particularly brutal home invasion. The trailer for the 2017 remake shows us a few quick flashes introducing Bruce Willis as a doctor and a family man before showing us his wife Lucy (Elisabeth Shue) and daughter Jordan (Camilla Morrone) who are then quickly excised from the film (or the trailer at least) so Bruce can get to his action shtick. Even the original trailer featured Kersey’s wife Joanna (Hope Lange) and daughter Carol (Kathleen Tolan) more prominently than this one. Sigh.
There was one positive thing about the entire trailer, well actually two, I like the fact that Sway Calloway is involved with the project as I am a fan of his show Sways Universe, the other positive is the presence of Vincent D’Onofrio and Dean Norris who are never bad in anything. There’s a great quote by the late great film critic Roger Ebert “No movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad.” which I think applies to D’Onofrio and Norris as well however the fact that this seems to be the only thing this film has going for it is kinda sad considering the rich potential of the source material.
There are a number of problems that should be addressed, the reason the original Death Wish was the best in the series by far is because Paul Kersey never wanted any of this. He never went out to buy a gun, someone gave it to him. After his first kill he was extremely upset and only towards the end does his attitude towards killing start to change. This trailer has none of that nuance.
It is possible that some of the images from the trailer appear in a very different sequence in the film but given the use of AC/DC‘s Back in Black and the glee with which Bruce Willis keeps plowing through ‘bad guys’ during the second half of the trailer this does not seem likely. What this trailer does not seem to understand is that Kersey is not a coldblooded vigilante and the original film is not simply a dumb action flick as opposed to its sequels, especially the third film which is unintentionally hilarious. This trailer seems far more inspired by the sequels than by the original.
Another reason the original stands out is because of the times during which it was released, Americans in the ’70s were ‘mad as hell’ to quote Network for all sorts of reasons which is why films like Dirty Harry, Death Wish and Taxi Driver did so well. In other words it was a product of its time which means it’s hard to replicate the impact it had at the time. This trailer looks like yet another film in a recent string of generic ‘geriaction’ flicks, I blame Taken for this, featuring an actor or actress in their 50s or 60s going around killing a large number of bad guys which is a shame because there is a far more interesting film to be made here.
To paraphrase the late great Roger Ebert, this trailer sucks! I sincerely hope the film does not.
Death Wish is directed by Eli Roth and stars Bruce Willis, Mike Epps, Camilla Morrone,Vincent D’Onofrio and Elizabeth Shue. It will be released in the U.S. on November 22nd, 2017. For international release dates, click here.
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