The original 1974 adaptation of Death Wish drew criticism for missing—or rather, completely opposing—the point of its source material, glamorizing vigilantism rather than condemning it. Coming from torture fetishist Eli Roth, this modern remake appears to do about as much as you’d expect to correct that course. This looks like just as much a hooded Bruce Willis superhero origin as Unbreakable.
Willis, his mere presence in a thriller immediately making this feel like a straight-to-video affair, stars in the former Charles Bronson of Paul Kersey. This version of Kersey is not an architect but a medical doctor—offering a sharper contrast of violence and altruism, of Bruce Willis and a lab coat that you don’t buy him in for a second. Otherwise, though, the shot-up guts of the story are the same. Kersey’s wife (Elisabeth Shue) and daughter (Kirby Bliss Blanton) suffer a home invasion that leaves the former dead and the latter sexually assaulted. It also sends Doc Kersey on a bloody tear through the city (formerly New York, now Chicago) to murder the attackers any other accused criminals he might happen upon. And since it’s Bruce Willis out there, the morbid one-liners flow like the blood of deserving punks.
Check out the film’s first trailer above. You can see the rest of this definitely-not-unsettling vision of a guy shooting people up—christ, in a nightclub too?—when Death Wish puts more mass murder in theaters November 22.
