← Back to Reviews
in
#192 - Death Wish II
Michael Winner, 1982
After relocating to Los Angeles following the events of the original Death Wish, an architect returns to his vigilante ways when a vicious street gang brutally attacks his housekeeper and his daughter.
I panned the original Death Wish for trying to take itself too seriously and gave Death Wish 3 a relative amount of levity for at least going overboard with its ludicrous vengeance formula. In terms of tone, Death Wish II falls squarely in between the first film's seriousness and the third film's campiness and ultimately ends up being even worse than either. Part of what makes Death Wish II a legitimately bad film is that it falls prey to what I've decided to call "Rocky II Syndrome" because as with that film, it's a sequel whose entire premise rests on undoing the point of its predecessor simply for the sake of producing a whole new film. While that doesn't necessarily guarantee a sequel's inferiority (by that rationale, Terminator 2 would count as such a film), the law of averages dictates that it will generally be for the worse. In the original Death Wish, the real tragedy of Charles Bronson's rampage against the criminals of New York is that he never managed to kill the people who drove him to vengeance - even if he did kill them, in all probability he would never know for certain that they were the ones responsible. Death Wish II, the first of four sequels that takes Bronson's brand of vigilante justice to increasingly ridiculous heights, makes it so that Bronson knows exactly which gang members to kill (complete with handy flashbacks to remind the audience how he knows). Of course, this just makes the whole film feel like a bad slasher movie more than anything else as Bronson slowly goes after his victims one by one with the occasional breather or complication. The film even goes so far as to reintroduce the detective who pursued Bronson during the previous film only to have him take Bronson's side, though his new love interest is understandably perturbed by the subject of vigilante murders.
As with its successor, Death Wish II is scored by none other than Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame, which results in a score that bounces haphazardly because histrionic but memorable guitar-based stings and incredibly generic low-rent cinematic scores. The film-making itself is cheap, amateurish and exploitative, which I guess is what a film like this deserves. After watching two other Death Wish films I should know what to expect by now, but even when you're going in expecting a lurid, violence-soaked action thriller that's almost perfectly okay with murderous vengeance, this film still bounces between being a disappointment (in terms of not being even half as entertaining as its successor) and meeting incredibly low expectations (as set by its predecessor). It remains to be seen whether or not I'll end up watching the remaining two Death Wish films but I can't imagine them being much worse than this one.
Michael Winner, 1982
After relocating to Los Angeles following the events of the original Death Wish, an architect returns to his vigilante ways when a vicious street gang brutally attacks his housekeeper and his daughter.
I panned the original Death Wish for trying to take itself too seriously and gave Death Wish 3 a relative amount of levity for at least going overboard with its ludicrous vengeance formula. In terms of tone, Death Wish II falls squarely in between the first film's seriousness and the third film's campiness and ultimately ends up being even worse than either. Part of what makes Death Wish II a legitimately bad film is that it falls prey to what I've decided to call "Rocky II Syndrome" because as with that film, it's a sequel whose entire premise rests on undoing the point of its predecessor simply for the sake of producing a whole new film. While that doesn't necessarily guarantee a sequel's inferiority (by that rationale, Terminator 2 would count as such a film), the law of averages dictates that it will generally be for the worse. In the original Death Wish, the real tragedy of Charles Bronson's rampage against the criminals of New York is that he never managed to kill the people who drove him to vengeance - even if he did kill them, in all probability he would never know for certain that they were the ones responsible. Death Wish II, the first of four sequels that takes Bronson's brand of vigilante justice to increasingly ridiculous heights, makes it so that Bronson knows exactly which gang members to kill (complete with handy flashbacks to remind the audience how he knows). Of course, this just makes the whole film feel like a bad slasher movie more than anything else as Bronson slowly goes after his victims one by one with the occasional breather or complication. The film even goes so far as to reintroduce the detective who pursued Bronson during the previous film only to have him take Bronson's side, though his new love interest is understandably perturbed by the subject of vigilante murders.
As with its successor, Death Wish II is scored by none other than Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin fame, which results in a score that bounces haphazardly because histrionic but memorable guitar-based stings and incredibly generic low-rent cinematic scores. The film-making itself is cheap, amateurish and exploitative, which I guess is what a film like this deserves. After watching two other Death Wish films I should know what to expect by now, but even when you're going in expecting a lurid, violence-soaked action thriller that's almost perfectly okay with murderous vengeance, this film still bounces between being a disappointment (in terms of not being even half as entertaining as its successor) and meeting incredibly low expectations (as set by its predecessor). It remains to be seen whether or not I'll end up watching the remaining two Death Wish films but I can't imagine them being much worse than this one.