Original Title: Death Wish
Year: 1974
Duration: 93 min.
Country: United States
Directed by: Michael Winner
Screenplay: Wendell Mayes (from the novel by Brian Garfield)
With: Charles Bronson, Vincent Gardenia, Stuart Margolin, Steven Keats, Hope Lange, Jeff Goldblum
Source: filmaffinity.com/us/film593746.html
This review may contain spoilers.
A Vigilante is a self-appointed doer of justice, but Paul Kersey is an architect. Not a fighter or an ex-green beret with a secret on his back, just a man who is dedicated to planning buildings and other constructions. He has a quiet life; his family consists of his wife, his daughter and his son-in-law. In short, a boring life that would barely justify a couple of minutes of film, or, in any case, perhaps a sitcom with recorded laughs.
Source: filmaffinity.com/us/film593746.html
But Paul Kersey has a problem, and that is that he has the face of Charles Bronson. If he'd had the face of Gene Wilder, Dick Van Dyke, or even Walter Matthau, one would expect big laughs and maybe some dramatic moment where the family pet has run away and is mistaken for the president's little dog, or something equally stupid. and at the same time funny, but since he has Bronson's face, one doesn't even get upset when some thugs, including a very young Jeff Goldblum, kill the architect's wife and rape his daughter, who's left traumatized.
Kersey doesn't fit the typical vigilante mold, where the villains kill a friend or family member or, at the very least, send him to the hospital or kill his dog and the guy turns out to be an ex. CIA agent, a green beret with three dozen decorations, or he is the world champion of kung fu, who systematically proceeds to kill, or hurt the bad guys in question. No!!!, this Kersey is a guy who knows how to handle firearms, but avoids them, and his first idea to defend himself against possible attackers is to fill a sock with 20 dollars in quarters.
Of course, after the attack on his family, the architect goes crazy, but strangely the thirst not enough to lead him to track down the three guys who killed his wife. That's right, in this movie Goldblum and his friends go unpunished. Anyway, Kersey is an architect, not a detective. There is a detective in the film, Lieutenant Frank Ochoa, superbly played by Vincent Gardenia, but he and the rest of the police force are more concerned with finding out who this vigilante is taking out the criminal element in the city, than shedding light to the initial crime.
Kersey begins his "vigilante" career as a scaredy-cat who walks through life with a sock full of change, but then a client gives him a gun and the guy, who initially vomits his dinner, in successive interventions becomes very good at what he does . The example of this "new kind vigilante" is expanding and other ordinary people begin to defend themselves against their attackers, so public opinion goes after him, meanwhile Lieutenant Ochoa must put an end to this new homemade justice that Kersey does. However, once you get to know him a bit, the architect is a nice good-nature guy, so you can imagine how the movie ends. (Hint: sequels in 1982, 1985, 1987 and 1994; remake in 2018 with Bruce Willis.)
Do I recommend it? Yes, without hesitation. Death Wish is decently acted, better than its sequels and imitations, and just the right length at just over 90 minutes.
Super entertaining movie, it's a pity that in the following ones they repeated the formula to the excess and in a certain way they became parodies. I remember that it bothered me a lot at the time that he didn't take revenge on those who killed his wife (when in these kind of films it is the most important thing and what the public wants) but then, thinking about it, it makes more sense. He is a vigilante in a more general sense, he has come to take all the trash (black and hispanic, obviously :( ) and not just a few.