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'Death Sentence' movie review |
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Written by Donald Munro, MCT
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Thursday, 30 August 2007 |
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DEATH SENTENCE
Grade: C
Rated: R for pervasive language and violence. Stars Kevin Bacon, Garrett Hedlund, Kelly Preston, John Goodman. Directed by James Wan. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.
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More than bullets fly in "Death Sentence," a film about a man who gets really mad when his bystander son is killed in a gang robbery. Limbs soar, too.
Specifically, there's a scene in which a bad guy's shin, hit by a blast from a firearm large enough to blow a hole in an embassy, is separated from his kneecap in such an acrobatic whoosh of blood and gore that the body part practically lands in the next county. This isn't mere violence; it's gymnastics.
But you'd hardly expect anything less in a revenge film directed by James Wan, the horror meister who brought us "Saw." Think of it as one long worship service in the Church of Vigilante Justice. By the end of the film, Kevin Bacon's character even takes on monastic qualities: impervious to pain and unafraid of death; ceremonially clad in his dead son's leather jacket; scarred head shaved except for a few monklike tufts. Don't mess with a "Death Wish" disciple, dude.
You'd be hard-pressed to call "Death Sentence" a miscarriage-of-justice flick. That's because Nick Hume (Bacon, stubborn and weathered) gives the legal system such a cursory chance to deal with the murder of his beloved older son, Brendan (Stuart Lefferty) the victim of a gang-initiation rite. There certainly isn't much time for audience outrage to build.
The cynical prosecutor in charge of the case wants to negotiate a plea bargain, which would let the murderer out of jail in a couple of years.
That's when Nick, without telling his wife (Kelly Preston) and younger son, decides to take matters into his own hands.
Wan has a sinister touch with chase-and-kill sequences, particularly one that unfolds in a multilevel parking garage. (Cinematographer John R. Leonetti's constantly darting camera swoops from floor to floor like a skittish bird.) Though much of the film is overwrought _ from the picture-postcard existence of the family before the tragedy to the predictable crumbling afterward of Nick's upscale mores _ the film does pack an impressive degree of tension into the first half.
But the thin story starts to stall, and the blood match that develops between Nick and Billy (a suitably egregious Garrett Hedlund), the gang leader responsible for his son's murder, gets bogged down in a seemingly never-ending cycle of revenge and retribution. Even an encounter with a beastly John Goodman, playing a gun-selling local crime boss who will never be featured in a commercial for the National Rifle Association, doesn't pick up the pace much.
Instead, we're left with a grim and bloody march that, curiously enough, doesn't allow much of a cathartic resolution for the audience. Emotion gives way to mechanical bloodshed. "Death Sentence" has its moments as an adequate genre flick, but revenge isn't all that sweet.
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