Stiffy's Site... Breeding Ground For Shenanigans & Nincompoopery!

We’ve all said it before, more so after we’ve established a family of our own. God forbid, if somethin were to happen to someone we love, we’d kill the bastards responsible. We’d hunt them down like a prey animal and first do unimaginable things to them for the pain they’ve caused us. Then when their lifeless bodies hung limply from the wall shackles, we’d kill them again, just for good measure. Director, James Wan rummaged into this premise with an updated version of Death Wish, relevantly titled Death Sentence.

It starts when Nick’s oldest son is murdered by a bunch of cartoonish thugs in the middle of a robbery. When I say they’re cartoonish, I really mean it. They drive around in formation, haulin ass in noisy muscle cars with flames painted on the side of them. The gang he’s up against looks like somethin that fell off the back of a bad pulp novel, white guys running around with shaved heads and cheap leather jackets, wieldin machetes in the middle of the city for no other reason that I can think of than that they generate more blood for Wan to splash on his camera.

The murder of his kid pushes Nick over the edge, and he declares war on the gangbangers who did it. Soon his entire family is in jeopardy, and the movie becomes about whether or not he can save him. It’s all of course, utterly ridiculous since five minutes ago Nick was sittin in a glorified cubicle pourin over risk assessments. Now he’s suddenly a badass weapons expert and hand to hand combat specialist. Come on Death Sentence, at least give us one of those idiotic trainin montages.

For most of its running time, the film alternates between overly emotive, poorly delivered speeches and clunky action sequences. The movie’s heavy emotional components never work, because the actors are clueless and don’t ever seem to know what to do with them. The film’s gritty action beats fall flat on their face because they’re clumsily staged and impossible to buy into. For instance in one of the movie’s most tense, big-action moments Kevin Bacon is supposed to climb out the front window of a car right before it falls off a building. Instead of gettin the hell out of there as fast as he can, he hangs out just sort of biding his time, only leaping out of the car right as it gets to the edge, as if he somehow knew there was an audience watchin & it’d make things more excitin if he escaped at the last minute.

On the positive side, John Goodman has a passively enjoyable cameo as a fat, sweaty arms dealer and at least Death Sentence isn’t loaded down with bad cheesy special effects. Wan sticks to practical stunts and does his best to deliver gritty, hard edged action. Safe to say he fails, but at least the guy tried. That’s more than we usually get in the standard, modern revenge flick. While I don’t necessarily think i wouldve ran out or encouraged anyone to run out to the theaters to see this, I do believe it deserves a rental when it shows up in your Netflix queue!

3 Stars - I seen worst!