Death Sentence (2007)

i must have seen a different film!!

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Since bursting onto the scene with his electrifying thriller "Saw" back in 2004, Australian director James Wan has solidified himself as one of the go-to guys for sheer, visceral chills. With a sharp sense of pacing and composition and a keen eye for talent, Wan has continued to expand his expertise with each new movie- whether it be the low-budget haunted-house story "Insidious", or indeed the massively budgeted action-extravaganza "Furious 7." But early in his near-fifteen year career, he unleashed a rather peculiar film that's quite unlike anything else he's ever done. A down-and-dirty, gritty tale of revenge entitled "Death Sentence", starring Kevin Bacon as a man pushed beyond his limits.Based very loosely upon the second "Death Wish" novel, the film follows mild-mannered father Nick Hume (Bacon), whose athletically gifted son Brendan is killed almost ritualistically one night as part of a gang-initiation. Fearing that the courts will fail to bring true justice for his son's death, Nick instead opts to act outside of the law, and he strikes back and kills the man responsible for Brendan's death. What he cannot fully comprehend, however, is the ramifications of his actions. Soon, he finds himself a target of the gang, and must act to protect himself and his remaining family from the violent and volatile Billy Darley (Garrett Hedlund)...The fascinating thing about the film is the fact that it's far from a black-and-white matter, and Wan wisely treats everyone- including the villainous Darley- as full-fledged characters. There's many layers to the story, and it becomes a tale of evil begetting evil. A story of men driven to become monsters due to the circumstances of their lives- including some circumstances beyond their control. You might not identify with or even necessarily sympathize with Hume or the villainous figures of the story... and yet, you always have a degree of empathy for them, which gives the whole story an additional level of complexity that benefits it greatly. You can understand where everyone is coming from and why, and the real tragedy ultimately comes down to the fact that these are potentially good people taken down a dark path.Bacon is an absolutely revelation in the film, and this is by far one of the most ambitious and risky performances of his career. He has so much ground to cover, and yet he accomplishes it with so much ease and gusto... further solidifying himself as one of the great underrated talents working in film. I also very much admired Hedlund's exquisite performance as Darley. A role he injects a great deal of pain and pathos into. It's a fine balancing act between agony and intimidation, and Hedlund pulls it off wonderfully. Supporting roles by the likes of Aisha Tyler, John Goodman and Kelly Preston are also very well cast and do their roles justice despite not always getting a great deal of screen-time.Visually, the film is quite well-assembled, with Wan finally getting something of a bigger budget to work with and show off his skill. And there are indeed many stand-out sequences, including a brief but incredibly intense court-room battle of wills built around slow zooms that left me breathless. I also definitely have to bring up the film's famous single-shot chase scene, which is a logistical marvel to behold- as Nick is pursued throughout a parking garage in one unbroken take. Wan might not have been a master of his craft quite yet, but this is a stepping stone to greater things, and you can see hints of what he would eventually accomplish in future works.The film does however have many glaring issues, which is where it loses a few points from me. While the camera-work is slick and stylish, I found the cinematography a bit too distracting in key moments- it filled with too much of that awful over-exposed, low- saturation early 2000's look. I'm sorry, I know it's gritty and all... but that type of image quality always looked cheap and tacky to me, and seems far too artificial. The film also outstays its welcome a bit too often in key scenes, and I can't help but feel a good ten minutes could have been cut out. Still, that can't diminish the fact that on the whole, "Death Sentence" is a solid, hard-hitting thriller that's worth checking out. With great themes and absolutely stunning performances, it's a bloody and distressing tale of revenge done right for the most part. And so, I give it a pretty good 7 out of 10.

How can a nice, kind, "Father of the Year" type morph into parts Navy Seal, Green Beret, Charles Bronson and Clint Eastwood --- with one hell of a score to settle? You tell me. I don't know. The bad reviews for "Death Sentence" are close to on point. The good reviews for "Death Sentence" are close to on point. Which side of the fence one is on depends on the level of one's "suspension of belief" meter.I liked it. Makes me want to put "Death Wish 3" in the DVD.

This film is from director James Wan, who directed Saw. It stars Kevin Bacon as a happily married father of two boys whose successful and stable life is devastated by his eldest son being brutally murdered by a gang. Bacon's character is no hard man, he is an average guy but he is pushed over the edge when he learns all he can hope for is that the killer will spend a very short couple of years in jail. He decides to drop his identification of the young guy who committed the murder allowing him to go free then follows him and kills him. Unfortunately for him the rest of the gang then seeks him out and matters escalate further.This is not a copy of Death Wish, the 1970s revenge thriller starring Charles Bronson, but is very similar in premise. There are also numerous revenge thrillers with similar ideas so this is not very original. It also is rather clichéd in many scenes of action and dialogue and in the characterisations - the scumbag psycho gang members, the family man pushed over the edge, the heartless lawyers etc. It has some quite exciting action and Bacon acts the part in his usual very capable, impressive style. The revenge aspect is something which appeals to many viewers as seeing a scumbag bad guy get their evil revisited on them is hugely satisfying. So this could have still been a really solid, entertaining thriller but I found it really badly thought through.Problems with plausibility are the main issue. We all know gangland initiations happen and innocent victims get killed and we also know criminals often get off lightly or go free due to lack of evidence. However, the victim's father causing the murderer to be caught at the scene, identifying him in a line up as the one who killed his son, his obvious ability to identify the highly distinctive cars the gang drives, the fact the gang are well known to the police etc all makes it rather unbelievable that the prosecutors feel unable to secure a conviction. There is also the assertion the gas station happened to be the only one around with no cctv and they just happened to run out of fuel immediately after a run-in with scumbags in two souped up cars and stops in a dangerous part of town. Given its position in such a bad part of town, would the gas station really not have cctv? The gas station worker got killed, would he really risk his life working there without even taking security steps of cctv? Would Bacon's character, a man who says he works in risk assessment, take his son through the worst part of town on low fuel and then stop at the gas station just after having threatening behaviour from the gang on the road? And then he allows his precious son to go in the shop. All very stupid to the point of being hard to believe. In movies a car gives one low fuel warning and people have to instantly stop to refuel. In real life you get warnings before fuel gets too low and you can drive for miles before really needing to stop. In this situation the father would surely have driven further out of the risky part of town and away from the threatening motorists he encountered.After that we have to believe that the police take no action and do not investigate the gang (who are well known to them) when the gang run through the streets and through a multi-storey car park firing guns, chasing Bacon and ending up with another gang member dead. They just question Bacon about whether he acted as a vigilante! Would there be no cctv in the streets or car park (the gang were not even disguised!) and not one terrified bystander being shot at was wanting to identify who was firing guns in their direction?! The dead gang member in the wrecked car could not be linked to the gang to confirm - along with all the other evidence - that it was the gang firing guns at people etc?Then we have to believe that when Bacon finally asks the police for help with the gang threatening his family, they do not arrest or even question the gang and just post one cop outside the property. Then even after the murder of Bacon's wife, attempted murder of him and his other son and the murder of the police officer guarding the property (in real life a cop's murder, even in violent America, is considered by police to be extremely serious) they STILL do not arrest or question the gang!!! They just give Bacon a really hard time as he lies in his hospital bed suffering extreme trauma and bereavement!!! Laughable! What made it even worse were little moments of horrendous stupidity like the nurse laughing and making a stupid, inappropriate joke to Bacon the second he opens his eyes in hospital after having had his entire family shot!!! Then the bank worker laughs and jokes he is taking the kids college funds when he takes cash out of the bank?! Nobody in this film acts how people do in real life! I found the director's earlier film Saw similarly poorly put together but with the additional negatives of grisly, torture-porn themes and worse acting. Others loved it and will love this film too. That is up to them but I think lack of logic is clearly a fact in this film.Many viewers only see some action, some excitement and some revenge and think this is a good film but I see all the flaws and think I am being extremely generous to give it 3/10. I only give that for Bacon's performance, John Goodman's cameo (as a gun dealer) and some decent, entertaining action.

I've been told over time through industry professionals, sometimes in classes I've taken, quotes from movie stars and writers and directors and so on, that if you have a good script and a mediocre director you can still have a decent film, but if the script is terrible it doesn't matter how great the director is but the project won't be able to fly. I still am not sure if James Wan is a great director - he really has a mixed record for me now that I've seen most of his films (in brief, Saw sucks, Conjuring 1 & 2 are terrific, and Furious 7 is... Furious 7! it has some extreme/dumb things and yet is brainless fun). But he does pull out a lot more directorially out of a script that is at times convincing and dramatic, and other times is hackneyed revenge/sometimes cop drama.There's one "virtuoso" scene as critics like to call it - which is euphemism for 'impressive' - where Kevin Bacon is being chased by the thugs, first on the street during day time (they don't give a f*** so much they open fire in broad daylight with a lot of people on the street), and then give chase through alleys, inside a kitchen, and leading out to a parking lot. Though at first it's cut fairly conventionally, the way Wan is shooting this is inspired (he used a 'rickshaw' type of device so the camera could lead in front of the actors at a faster speed, plus on golf carts), but when it gets into the parking lot Wan decides to go full Chanwook Park and do it in one shot. And it's done with extreme creativity (both extreme and creative) as Bacon and the other actors are running, actually running, and going through little patches of space to go one level to another until our (anti)hero gets to the top level where his car is at.That last aspect of how he happened to be where his car is exactly at is convenient story-wise (that it's the parking lot where he works at, he just happened to get back there while running in a frenzy), nevertheless Wan has a strong visual idea and executes it with his crew wonderfully. And throughout much (though not all) of Death Sentence, he is doing his best to make a (to say it generously) hit or miss screenplay fly as something harrowing and intense. The movie gives us a good look at a family - the dialog between this somewhat typical 'happy' family, brothers in-fight a bit, one son gets in trouble at school (where mom happens to be Dean) - and then the bad thing happens, where one of the sons is killed in a "gang initiation" thing that looks like a gas station robbery, and the killer is let go without much fanfare.The details of how this young thug is practically let go by the court for, uh, "reasons" is a little too tidy and convenient (the gas station happened to be the "only one in America" without surveillance), and maybe that's what I keep coming back to as a problem with the movie: convenience, things that the movie kind of lets go so the story can keep going forward. Other things like that is how the cop character (Detective Wallis, played by Aisha Tyler replacing a "50-ish white guy", which is cool!) doesn't do more when Nick Hume starts to take matters into his own hands, first going after the released killer in the middle of the night, and then when, later on (spoilers) two cops are killed while the main batch of criminals go through them to get into Nick's house in the middle of the night to settle scores. Like, I know you're angry at Nick for making this situation worse and worse by starting s*** with criminals, but now two cops are DEAD, you have more important things to worry about now! So there's logic inconsistencies. Why recommend it? For me, the gritty approach to the camera-work and the acting from the criminal characters (and John Goodman in a small but pivotal role!) connected and felt strong. I can criticize certain parts of the style, like the choice of music (sometimes it's alright, other times it feels like it was picked by an uninspired/lazy music supervisor with some of these songs), but Wan mostly got how to make this intense by going for 'real' and yet it's still a cinematic approach to the 'real', if that makes sense, like it has a logical approach to how characters move through rooms and buildings and work with guns.The other aspect is Bacon. He really, really brings it and if you like him generally this is him going full blown fiery/emotional force. But there's a progression to it - he is playing a 'normal' guy, fairly white collar, suburban middle class, and when Nick does this first violent act he's genuinely shocked, in tears, shaking. It's not something that looks and feels like a movie character that brushes things off, and his vulnerability brings us closer to his experience as he digs himself deeper into vigilante/revenge drama (even down to how he does a 'Taxi Driver' shaving-head bit, which is much messier and all the better for it). All the while, this actor brings it and finds the moments where nuance can play into it. He and Wan and a few other things elevate a hackneyed script, which is the exception to the general principle of 'script script script'. In this sake, I dug it. Usually.