'Death Wish' Looks Like It Could Be The Fascistic Fever Dream That Chicagoans Really Don't Need

By Stephen Gossett in Arts & Entertainment on Aug 3, 2017 10:24PM

Back when we first heard about the Chicago-set, Bruce Willis-starring remake of Death Wish, it struck as a particularly bad idea. We wrote last September, when shooting details were announced: "[R]ight now seems like just about the worst time in recent history for Hollywood to order a remake of a fascistic vigilante-justice fantasy from a director with all the subtlety of a bloody fist to a rotting face," that filmmaker being Hostel director Eli Roth. With the death of Travyon Martin not far in the past and relaxed gun laws making headlines, plus the rise of white nationalism, a white dude single-handedly "cleaning up" a Chicago-as-urban-wasteland seemed shockingly ill-timed. We still don't know what the end product will look like, but the trailer, which just arrived today, doesn't exactly assuage our fears—and we're not alone.

The trailer for the film, a remake of the 1974 Charles Bronson revenge actioneer, follows an avenging-angel-type Willis as he seeks retribution after his family is attacked in a home invasion—which seemingly takes him deep into the Chicago crime morass. The filmmakers seem quite aware that they're treading on problematic grounds and look to avoid the most obvious racially charged missteps: some the victims he assists in the trailer are people of color; some criminals are not. But in a city where the department actually tasked with upholding the law was found to have engaged in a pattern of constitutional-rights abuses and where officers will face trial for allegedly covering up the Laquan McDonald killing, do we really want to cheer on answer-to-no-one vigilantism?

Sam Adams—who makes the point that Chicago "is that favorite race-coded target of Trump’s dishonest rhetoric"—writes in Slate:

"One might imagine that a thriller released in 2017 would be at least a little ambivalent about the spectacle of a man wading into the brackish waters of urban crime with his guns blazing, and maybe Death Wish is at least a little more subtle than its rah-rah trailer suggests. (As a filmmaker, Roth is something of a moral idiot, which could work in either direction.) But studio marketing departments are experts at knowing their audiences, and it’s not hard to imagine that there’s a substantial constituency out there for people who want law-enforcement, civilian or otherwise, to shoot first and ask questions later. Or, better yet, never."

Over at GQ, Joshua Rivera found it all a bit discomfiting, too. He wrote:

"The new Death Wish has an entirely different context [than the original], one where guns are routinely turned on black citizens by white supremacists and white cops, where mass shootings regularly occur and lawmakers refuse to do anything about it, where guns in the hands of the populace is not a rarity but arguably an epidemic. It takes a profound level of either ignorance or craven, willful opportunism to think that this is a moment to make a film about a white man's rage channeled through the barrel of a gun."

Film writer Alan Zilberman was more succinct in his criticism.

As others have emphasized, we'll have to wait and see before we know for sure how ably or ineptly the film navigates its thorny pastures. But so far, the reviews aren't encouraging.