Seven Sins Marathon Movie 7: Death Wish (1974)

The final sin of the Seven Sins Marathon is the sin of wrath.  Basically it is the sin of severe anger.  Interestingly enough, this is being written on the same day that I am angry at the Italian soccer fans (football for you Europeans) that drove up and down the street honking their horns for two hours following their team winning one game.  Maybe that’s not interesting.  Either way, it made me angry which is kind of fitting for writing about wrath.  Maybe.

The movie that I picked to cover the topic of wrath was Death Wish.  Death Wish is about a man played by Charles Bronson who goes vigilante on the criminals of New York City after an attack on his family.  It’s based on a book, started a five movie series, and was made in 1974.  It looks like a seventies movie.

The biggest flaw in Death Wish is the simplicity of it.  The direction, acting, writing, cinematography...everything seems so basic and simple.  Simplicity can be a good thing in a movie sometimes.  In this case, everything was simplistic.  That makes the movie seem to have no substance.  It makes the movie seem thin.  It pushed boundaries in some areas but that isn’t enough when the entire plot is so one-note.  If they had added just one more layer to the main character, making the plot even the smallest bit more complex, I think the movie could have been improved.  What do I know though?  I don’t make movies.  I’ll leave that to the movie makers, I guess.

With how simple it is aside, the acting was fine.  I’m not going to say it was amazing, but it fit what the movie was.  Charles Bronson in this role is truly the predecessor to Liam Neeson in Taken.  He is the average seeming guy who becomes a badass after something happens to his family.  Although the characters have different pasts, and there is a different range of targets between them, I can see some inspiration.  There was also a surprise appearance by Jeff Goldblum, not playing his normal, well-known intelligent character type.  That may have been the highlight of the movie for me.

Don’t take any of this writeup the wrong way.  I liked the movie.  The problem with it is that it is nothing special.  It is serviceable.  But there is nothing to keep me remembering this movie.  There are no memorable moments, no memorable performances, no memorable shots.  The movie just moves along and happens without leaving a trace of itself behind.  That could be what you want out of a movie.  I’d rather have something that sticks with me.  If I’m going to spend an hour and a half watching something, the least that it could do is to give me something to hold onto.  Death Wish didn’t do that.

Death Wish did, however, finish of the seven sins, but it did not finish the Seven Sins Marathon.  There is one movie remaining before the marathon comes to a close.  The movie ties together all of the sins.  It’s a classic directed by David Fincher.  It is named Se7en.