Welcome to DEATH WISH 3: WHITE FLIGHT JUST FEELS RIGHT! This movie will massage all the most paranoid day-dreams of a suburban father, and culminate in a massive gunfight where a white man with a mustache solves the crime problem in New York by just shooting everyone. It's great!
The DEATH WISH series occupies a subgenre I call "Dad movies." White men grew up, had their own kids, bought a house, and began clinging to the TV for local news on crimes in the "big scary city" right down the highway.
The DIRTY HARRY series occupies this genre as well. Dirty Harry is a through-and-through "Dad movie," and not just because it's got Clint Eastwood being the perfect sort of tough guy that "Hollywood doesn't make anymore." Harry is hard on crime, and hard on those who get in his way. The whole movie is about how the system keeps fucking with him with "bureaucracy" and "the Constitution" that keeps him from shooting up thugs willy-nilly. Pencil-pushers and liberal geeks want to cradle and defend these "creeps" and pat them on the back to go offend decent society once again. It's just this sort of simplified view of the world that the movie loves to coax out of viewers, get them red in the face and calling for blood. It doesn't care about a measured discussion, nor would that be fun to watch - and boy, is the movie fun as hell to watch. We're introduced to Harry pretty early on by being told he once shot a rape suspect in cold blood. Sure, that's not "by the book," but its justice, dammit!
The easiest way for a "Dad movie" to work is for them to make urban crime a "us vs. them" debate. It's decent society who wouldn't hurt a fly until you push them too far, and a thuggish gallery of rapists, drug peddlers, arsonists and murderers who the system is just too damn easy on. There's no "naive youths" caught in the grip between poverty and crime - that would muddy the waters too much. Dad movies want to make you feel good when Harry shoots down a bank robber, a serial killer, otherwise we might get stuck in some sort of sticky moral quandary and who the fuck needs that bullshit.
Almost everyone is a "creep." In the world of DEATH WISH, there are two classes of people: the hard-working people, and the creeps. The movie chooses to use this word (give or take 10,000 times) to describe the objectively terrible gangsters who run around the place, terrorizing innocents (mostly old people). As well, the movie has a token minority couple and a black little boy who's unaffiliated with the gangs (who definitely outnumber everyday people here) to act as the one self-conscious part of the movie where it recognizes this might all sound crazy and regressive. All the creeps are easy to identify because they have a cool primitive marking on their head, kind of like how all the gangs in WARRIORS have themes. When Paul shoots down the first gang member, we see his gang getting amped to hit the streets while mourning the loss of their bro. "They killed the Giggler, man!" he yelps to his crew. This is that kind of movie.
New York looks fucking post-apocalyptic in this movie. Usually when we get a peek of pre-cleanup NYC in movies like BIG or TAXI DRIVER (or BASKET CASE, I guess), it's of Times Square - bright lights, hookers, dope pushers. In this, New York has already gone to shit, and they've picked out a nice outer-boroughs haunt for Mr. Wish to shoot up without us feeling too bad about it - its a dirt pile anyway! Reminds me of a few early scenes of Friedkin's FRENCH CONNECTION, where I had to ask my dad where this movie takes place. "New York! It wasn't always cat musicals and Sbarros."
So Paul back to scummy New York to help a friend out who is having trouble with some gangs, and he gets arrested for murder when he arrives and finds his friend dead. You'd think that this setup means Paul is on the run from creeps AND cops and now has to solve his friends murder, but no, pretty soon after he gets arrested the police captain decides he's going to break all the rules (and the Constitution and stuff) and let Paul just be an avenging angel without police interference. Routinely he comes in the movie to alternately reign him in and encourage him to keep going, so this movie doesn't really "get" "characters." They could have just had Paul do his thing and had the cops be the ineffectual doofuses they always are in these movies, but instead they decide to do something different and give him a benefactor. I couldn't pick up where Paul gets his funding for this stuff but it would have been cool if the cops were doing that.
The weirdest thing about this movie is how long it takes to motivate Paul Kersey into a blood rage. The gang kills his friend in the opening scene, break into and rob and old couple, rapes a woman (inarguably the worst scene in the movie and should have been left offscreen), murders an old lady and blows up his friend's autobody shop (an American businessman targeted, no less). Then the gang beats the shit out of that guy. It's not all darkness and pain though - Paul meets a nice pretty young blonde lady, a defense attorney for "creeps" who resents her line of work and loves Paul for his bravery to fight back. She has glasses and then takes them off and she looks so pretty! Maybe she should have kept them on because Charles Bronson at this point looks like 20 miles of bad road and they make love anyway and you can do better, honey.
Oh, then the gangs cut the brakes on her car and it goes into a mild collision which makes the car explode. I'm really happy the government has upped regulation standards on cars, because apparently in the 80s a small accident left everyone involved dead. Those nitroglycerin cooling systems were problematic from the get-go.
Or maybe the weirdest thing is how before he goes into the blood rage at the end, he's setting up these elaborate traps in his and his neighbors apartments to get burglars as they come through the window. In his place, he puts a nail board below his kitchen window and grins happily like Macauley Culkin (JACOB'S LADDER) in HOME ALONE when he comes back and sees a red streak on the kitchen floor. Red criminal scum's blood, that is.
There's also some 2nd Amendment stuff in there that fits nicely with all of the paranoid Tea Party stuff. This old Jewish couple has a gun to defend themselves but the cops come and take it away because there's some law against freedom. It's just a straw-man moment where the government swoops into action against regular citizens but is inept to take on the real problems. Just like earlier when one of the neighborhood innocents says the cops don't show up except to hand out parking tickets. This movie is for people who write blogs about how much they hate jaywalking and seat belt laws (as opposed to the cool people who write blogs about 25 year old Charles Bronson vehicles, but I digress).
The movie has a big hard-on for guns, too. There's this fetishistic scene of Kersey showing off his new .475 Wildey Magnum, a pretty obvious ploy to one-up Dirty Harry's totally emasculating .357 Magnum. Jesus, Harry, go home until you're ready to play with the men.
So he's showing off this gun to a room full of residents of his apartment complex for some reason, and they look kind of pumped. He's rubbing the gun all erotically, and it's weird but it takes all sorts and I'm not one to judge and different strokes. Then the massacre comes.
This movie just decides all at once that enough is enough, and Paul starts going apeshit. For seemingly no reason, the lead gangster calls down all of the other hoods to join the war, who start rampaging and and burning down buildings. This pillaging stuff is pretty exciting because there's a few long shots of buildings burning and you remember back when they had to at least set SOMETHING on fire to get a shot, but this one doesn't even look like a model. It's great to see people try in these movies.
So Paul is shooting down dudes left and right. He's assisted by not only the police captain from earlier, who does a tagteam thing with him, but also by local residents who have gotten fed up too. The movie clearly thinks its heroic to have average citizens mob up and murder criminals, so the movie kind of rolls with it. It feels very much like a video game, in that it's a lot of repetitive actions. Reminds me of playing Grand Theft Auto - just aim, shoot, repeat.
So the movie is fucking ridiculous, but I can't help but be charmed by it. There's something very enticing about a movie with a very singular vision that feels personal to those who made it. The movie seems legitimately concerned with inner-city crime, and how it affects the communities around it. These movies function as wish-fulfillment for those guys who feel disenfranchised by the justice system and left to the dogs when it comes to police protection. Maybe it's just as much for city dwellers as it is for suburban dads who look at and judge these issues from their armchairs. Ultimately movies are for the fantasy, whether its ugly or not. Revenge movies in particular challenge what it is that separates polite society from everything else. They're a means of questioning what we believe and asking us to operate in another person's headspace. I know this doesn't resemble reality at all, but I also know it doesn't ultimately matter. It doesn't matter if we know that in reality Paul Kersey wouldn't be some folk-hero, righting wrongs - he'd be a fucking murderer and would make things way, way worse in any high-crime area. But setting up these straw-men lets us have some guilt-free good times with Charles Bronson.
Since this is the Internet, and reading is hard, I've decided to adopt a perfectly-objective, inarguable measure of a film's worth. It's so objective and so clearly-defined, in fact, that I won't even bother explaining the system in any detail.
I give DEATH WISH 3 a rating of 4 out of 3 CREEPS:
Can I Stream It?
So Paul back to scummy New York to help a friend out who is having trouble with some gangs, and he gets arrested for murder when he arrives and finds his friend dead. You'd think that this setup means Paul is on the run from creeps AND cops and now has to solve his friends murder, but no, pretty soon after he gets arrested the police captain decides he's going to break all the rules (and the Constitution and stuff) and let Paul just be an avenging angel without police interference. Routinely he comes in the movie to alternately reign him in and encourage him to keep going, so this movie doesn't really "get" "characters." They could have just had Paul do his thing and had the cops be the ineffectual doofuses they always are in these movies, but instead they decide to do something different and give him a benefactor. I couldn't pick up where Paul gets his funding for this stuff but it would have been cool if the cops were doing that.
The weirdest thing about this movie is how long it takes to motivate Paul Kersey into a blood rage. The gang kills his friend in the opening scene, break into and rob and old couple, rapes a woman (inarguably the worst scene in the movie and should have been left offscreen), murders an old lady and blows up his friend's autobody shop (an American businessman targeted, no less). Then the gang beats the shit out of that guy. It's not all darkness and pain though - Paul meets a nice pretty young blonde lady, a defense attorney for "creeps" who resents her line of work and loves Paul for his bravery to fight back. She has glasses and then takes them off and she looks so pretty! Maybe she should have kept them on because Charles Bronson at this point looks like 20 miles of bad road and they make love anyway and you can do better, honey.
Oh, then the gangs cut the brakes on her car and it goes into a mild collision which makes the car explode. I'm really happy the government has upped regulation standards on cars, because apparently in the 80s a small accident left everyone involved dead. Those nitroglycerin cooling systems were problematic from the get-go.
Or maybe the weirdest thing is how before he goes into the blood rage at the end, he's setting up these elaborate traps in his and his neighbors apartments to get burglars as they come through the window. In his place, he puts a nail board below his kitchen window and grins happily like Macauley Culkin (JACOB'S LADDER) in HOME ALONE when he comes back and sees a red streak on the kitchen floor. Red criminal scum's blood, that is.
There's also some 2nd Amendment stuff in there that fits nicely with all of the paranoid Tea Party stuff. This old Jewish couple has a gun to defend themselves but the cops come and take it away because there's some law against freedom. It's just a straw-man moment where the government swoops into action against regular citizens but is inept to take on the real problems. Just like earlier when one of the neighborhood innocents says the cops don't show up except to hand out parking tickets. This movie is for people who write blogs about how much they hate jaywalking and seat belt laws (as opposed to the cool people who write blogs about 25 year old Charles Bronson vehicles, but I digress).
 |
| Paul Kersey's real girlfriend would never leave him. |
The movie has a big hard-on for guns, too. There's this fetishistic scene of Kersey showing off his new .475 Wildey Magnum, a pretty obvious ploy to one-up Dirty Harry's totally emasculating .357 Magnum. Jesus, Harry, go home until you're ready to play with the men.
So he's showing off this gun to a room full of residents of his apartment complex for some reason, and they look kind of pumped. He's rubbing the gun all erotically, and it's weird but it takes all sorts and I'm not one to judge and different strokes. Then the massacre comes.
This movie just decides all at once that enough is enough, and Paul starts going apeshit. For seemingly no reason, the lead gangster calls down all of the other hoods to join the war, who start rampaging and and burning down buildings. This pillaging stuff is pretty exciting because there's a few long shots of buildings burning and you remember back when they had to at least set SOMETHING on fire to get a shot, but this one doesn't even look like a model. It's great to see people try in these movies.
So Paul is shooting down dudes left and right. He's assisted by not only the police captain from earlier, who does a tagteam thing with him, but also by local residents who have gotten fed up too. The movie clearly thinks its heroic to have average citizens mob up and murder criminals, so the movie kind of rolls with it. It feels very much like a video game, in that it's a lot of repetitive actions. Reminds me of playing Grand Theft Auto - just aim, shoot, repeat.
So the movie is fucking ridiculous, but I can't help but be charmed by it. There's something very enticing about a movie with a very singular vision that feels personal to those who made it. The movie seems legitimately concerned with inner-city crime, and how it affects the communities around it. These movies function as wish-fulfillment for those guys who feel disenfranchised by the justice system and left to the dogs when it comes to police protection. Maybe it's just as much for city dwellers as it is for suburban dads who look at and judge these issues from their armchairs. Ultimately movies are for the fantasy, whether its ugly or not. Revenge movies in particular challenge what it is that separates polite society from everything else. They're a means of questioning what we believe and asking us to operate in another person's headspace. I know this doesn't resemble reality at all, but I also know it doesn't ultimately matter. It doesn't matter if we know that in reality Paul Kersey wouldn't be some folk-hero, righting wrongs - he'd be a fucking murderer and would make things way, way worse in any high-crime area. But setting up these straw-men lets us have some guilt-free good times with Charles Bronson.
Since this is the Internet, and reading is hard, I've decided to adopt a perfectly-objective, inarguable measure of a film's worth. It's so objective and so clearly-defined, in fact, that I won't even bother explaining the system in any detail.
I give DEATH WISH 3 a rating of 4 out of 3 CREEPS:
The system also allows for us to give it two grinning BRONSONS:
Can I Stream It?
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