Death Wish
Ah, is this the more centrist response to Dirty Harry? This is as fascist and anti-hippie as that, but the hero is a just a regular architect, not a credentialed murderer. The cosmopolitrometer is off the charts, lower than The Town, this is the new benchmark.
In the first ten minutes, the loving wife is introduced and immediately murdered without pity, a complete ripoff from A Clockwork Orange. Alex is played by none other than Jeff Goldblum.
The daughter is just brutally raped and goes completely catatonic. Her husband is a complete wet blanket, a downright coward.
Our hero is a Korean War vet, a conscious objector, but he can use a pistol, as he is Charles freaking Bronson. He only gets a chance to shoot a gun when he goes to some bumfuck Arizona town fixing up some millionaire project. The client is some eccentric millionaire (hippies are the poor people, he also seems to have fun in Woodstock), and he likes guns. As the project goes well, the client gives him a handgun, as a gift. This being pre-9/11, taking a gun on the checked luggage in a plane is no big deal.
After getting to the big city and witnessing crime done by minorities and hippies, he goes to secluded places at night and just murders people left and right.
The cops are onto him, and eventually they get to him, but the politicians are worried his arrest will lead to copycats, so he is busted and shipped to Chicago, but everything on the down low. It becomes Somebody Else’s Problem and there’s the sequel right there.
Just like Dirty Harry, the initial film is much less radical than the rest. Our hero visibly shakes and drinks scotch when he punched some mugger with 20 bucks in quarters, and pukes pretty hard after killing his first victim. But towards the end, he is more desensitised. This was based on a book, perhaps the reverse Starship Troopers is in effect?
This was actually remade by Eli Roth, but the true successor to this is clearly The Equalizer, and maybe John Wick. Power fantasies for middle aged men.
This was supposed to be directed by Sydney Lumet, who did Serpico instead. Good man!
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.