As trashy vigilante fantasies go, you could do a lot worse than Death Sentence. That might sound like damning with faint praise, and perhaps it is, but director James Wan deserves credit for dressing up this Death Wish-knockoff with honest-to-goodness visual flair.
Kevin Bacon lends a welcome intensity to the role of Nick Hume, a well-heeled business executive blessed with a beautiful wife (Kelly Preston) and two strapping teenaged sons, Brandon and Lucas (Stuart Lafferty and Jordan Garrett). One fateful night, Nick and Brandon are driving in one of those rough parts of town where (as Bruce Springsteen once crooned) when you hit a red light, you don’t stop. They pull into a gas station just before a gang of ski-masked punks, guns a-blazin’, pour out of two muscle cars to rob the place. The store clerk is killed in the ensuing scuffle, and one of the gangbangers uses a machete to fell young Brandon. Nick tackles his son’s killer and pulls off his ski mask, but the youth breaks free.
Grieving dad survives and is able to identify the machete-wielder, a thug named Joe (Matthew O’Leary), out of a police lineup. But the eyewitness identification is all that prosecutors have to go on, and Nick is mortified to learn that the best that Lady Justice can offer is a plea bargain in which the defendant gets three to five years in prison.
That travesty is enough to make Nick sabotage his own testimony, allowing Joe to go free. Dad has his own plans for doling out punishment. In one of the quickest vigilante turnarounds ever recorded on celluloid, Nick goes home from court and fumbles through his tool shed for a handy implement of death. He finds a rusted knife, trails Joe to a ramshackle apartment complex and pulls a Charlie Bronson on the punk.
Fortunately for Nick, the homicide detective assigned to the case (Aisha Tyler) either has no interest in pursuing Joe’s killer or can’t connect the dots between Nick’s apparent motive and the suspicious bandage now on his hand. But Joe’s brother and fellow gang member, Billy (Garrett Hedlund in a Ben Foster sort of role), can sure figure out the score. Suddenly Nick has sparked an all-out gang war against Billy and a dirtbag patron played by a delightfully scenery-chewing John Goodman.
Wan is all surface-level noise and fury, but he provides the requisite jolts. Indeed, the film is only truly groan-inducing when it pushes alleged parallels between Nick and Billy – both seek vengeance for slain family members, yada yada – and a random subplot involving Brandon’s neglected younger brother.
Shake off any pretense of subtext, however, and Death Sentence delivers the goods. The no-frills plot is drawn in swift, concise brushstrokes; the only seriously sour note is Nick’s rapid-fire transformation from white-collar exec to head-shaven badass. No matter. Ian Mackenzie Jeffers‘ script is ludicrous, ostensibly by design, and has gone off the deep end long before a nearly dead Bacon, clad in a hospital gown, clambers out of his hospital bed so that he can mete out more revenge.
Admittedly, there are a few seriously lunkheaded moments. Nick and his wife at one point are awakened by a blaring car horn. Nick looks out his bedroom window and sees that a policeman parked in a patrol car in front of their home has been slain, the man’s head slumped against the steering wheel. Once that grisly sight is revealed to us, though – poof! The horn stops.
Wan’s craftsmanship makes up for such occasional blunders. Drenched in suitably garish, high-contrast cinematography courtesy John R. Leonetti (Wan’s go-to lenser), Death Sentence does not sacrifice style for gore. A particular standout scene involves the gang chasing Nick through a parking garage. With pure showoff panache, Leonetti follows the action through multiple levels of the parking garage in a single shot as the camera swoops under guardrails and up ramps. It’s just damned cool.
Cutting to the Chase with Phil Bacharach 