“Revenge is a dish best served cold.” An old Klingon proverb, we are told at the beginning of revenge epic Kill Bill. And who doesn’t like being served a nice, chilled dish of a revenge movie from time to time? The latest is the vigilante justice movie Death Sentence by James Wan of ‘Saw’ fame and starting Kevin Bacon. If you are familiar with the Death Wish movies, you’ll be familiar with Death Sentence, as they are both based on the same book.
Basically, a man’s son is killed in what appears to be a convenience store robbery (but actually turns out to have been a gang initiation killing), and while they killer is caught, he slips through the fingers of the justice system and is let free. Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) is of course outraged that the man who killed his son isn’t getting at least life in prison, and you can see where the movie goes from there. Hume basically starts a one man gang war with the thugs and they in turn go after the rest of his family. It is fairly simplistic, but then again, what revenge movie isn’t? It’s about a guy just trying to avenge his son’s death, and that’s what you should expect going into it. Now I won’t reveal anymore of the plot, so you can feel safe reading on if you haven’t seen it.
Death Sentence actually works better than I expected, especially with the terrible reviews it got. However, the problem is it could have worked a lot better, and after about half way through the movie a lot of things happen that almost make you scratch your head, wondering just what exactly the screenwriter was thinking (or smoking) when he wrote this movie. The driving force of the movie is basically Kevin Bacon. If it wasn’t for him, this ship would have sunk - and fast. But he delivers an extremely effective performance, both as a man who just lost his son and also as a man who is out for justice. I don’t know who thought of casting Kevin Bacon, but it was a great decision and he delivers.
And of course, being a revenge movie you are going to have some action revenge scenes, and I was kind of surprised that they delivered in this. They are pretty intense and you can really feel the blows and see the hits. This is defiantly not a pg-13 affair – and it doesn’t feel over stylized or manically edited (like the director’s previous Saw movies), either. There is even a really great tracking shot that went on for quite a few minutes about a third of the way through. After a while I realized what I was watching hadn’t been cut for a while, and it was actually a very well constructed sequence, I was impressed. The second half of the movie is decidedly over the top, and sometimes goes too far, but I still think if you are just sitting there to see a revenge movie, then you’ll generally be happy with the revengin’.
But despite a very strong Kevin Bacon and some action scenes that deliver, Death Sentence is far from perfect. There are a lot of really poorly set up sub plots (i.e. the one with the police detective, or the one with the fat guy in the Bubbles glasses) which didn’t serve to accomplish anything other than...well I’m not sure what they were going for with those at all. In addition to this, there are some pretty big plot holes... maybe I wouldn’t call them plot holes, but I would say there are defiantly some instances where you find yourself wondering, “after all this shooting in the middle of the busy city, you’d think there would at least be some police sirens,” and things like that. In addition to this there are a lot of sequences which would have been fairly strong on their own legs, but the filmmakers seemed to always jump in and have a character come from nowhere to explain the obvious or cue emotional music in a scene that didn’t need it. Instead of just letting the audience watch the scene unfold and support itself, they seemed to always seemed to interrupt the flow to explain things to the lowest common denominator. “Hey, maybe they won’t know they are supposed to feel sad now. Put some sad music in there.” It comes off as lazy screenwriting and a lack of respect for the audience.
But the biggest problem of all with Death Sentence is how it seems to justify everything Bacon’s character does. While we do sympathize with him, and we do want him to succeed and avenge his son’s death, I feel that the movie was doing one thing but saying another. It was showing how revenge ultimately doesn’t fix the problem. He doesn’t get his son back and he actually makes things a lot worse for him and his family. Sure, he gets to have some revenge, but at what cost? This is what Death Sentence seemed to be doing, it’s what we saw, and in that respect I actually think it was thematically strong. But what it seemed to be saying was that Bacon’s character was doing the ‘right’ thing and that in the end it all ‘comes out in the wash’ type thing. But that makes no sense because we just saw Bacon’s character have his life torn apart in pursuit of revenge and we saw him loose everything – so why did the movie seem to always want to say otherwise? We clearly just saw Bacon’s character ruin his family’s lives, so why try to make it look like he did the right thing?
So Death Sentence does have a lot of flaws – giant, gaping, nearly fatal flaws – but it does seem to somehow stay afloat. It’s a boat that has a giant hole in its hull but just doesn’t quite seem to want to sink. What’s keeping it from going under is the exceptional Kevin Bacon who turns in a performance that basically makes the movie, and a series of serviceable action sequences which are generally intense and satisfying, if over the top. It’s unfortunate that the movie sunk a bit lower during the second half due to some bizarre plot twists and “what just happened?!” moments, and the fact that the movie does one thing and says another is a huge, inescapable flaw. Death Sentence would otherwise have been a much stronger revenge film – one that has some fairly well done action scenes but one that also tries to actually say something about the nature of revenge. As it is, it’s a movie that has some fairly well done action scenes but one that doesn’t quite know which way it is going thematically and one that treats the audience like they are a flock of goats. But if you were interested in this movie in the first place, you should still give it a shot, even if you just wait for DVD.
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