Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
This is the war on drugs episode. The one where the coroner lifts the shrouds on drug victims, and it’s all children. Boys who got shot robbing liquor stores, 13 years old girl prostituting themselves on the street, the works.
The script (if you can call the minor excuse plot around the action sequences and stupid explosions everywhere) was written by the guy from The Enforcer.
Bronson is on the older side, so he doesn’t do much physical stuff, he mostly shoots people while looking gruff. But that was enough it seems:
Bronson was offered 4 million dollars to reprise his role, more than a half of the film’s entire budget
This is unbelievable, there’s yet another punk arcade dude played by a future well known actor: it’s the “You’re not dealing with morons here” guy from The Big Lebowski. Plus a cameo by Mitch “The X-Files/Shocker” Pileggi.
Starts with a cold open where thugs try to rape a business woman in an underground parking lot, and Charles Broson murders them on the spot, with his trusty Walter PPK that blows them across the tarmac. But it’s all a dream.
Kersey’s architecture business is booming, again, and he’s got a girlfriend with a daughter, again. The daughter dies by speedballing once, since she took drugs from the racialised community, so the protagonist tracks down the dealer and shoots him into the top of a bumper car ride, frying him instantly. The efficient electric chair hypothesis is not subtext, it’s text.
Just like The Big Lebowski, some rich dude hires our protagonist to do something for him. In this case, it’s murdering the drug gangs, since his own daughter died of cocaine overdose as well. He owns some newspaper and is willing to put serious money on the line.
There’s a pair of police detective sniffing around. They are Temu George Takei and Temu Ben Gazzara. The racial stereotype is dirty, but tries to take on our credentialed murderer and gets unceremoniously killed, like he does everyone, with ease and small calibre guns.
The bad guys are two separate gangs that control 90% of cocaine traffic in South California. Didn’t know the drug trade was so centralised, they must have read the “monopolies are good” essays.
One of the gangbangers is Danny Trejo! This is important, because he and the other enforcers go shakedown some Italian restaurant and the protagonist is recognised, from San Francisco! He has to deploy his booby-trapped wine bottle and scram!
Next up, there’s a video rental store. It has a massive The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 cardboard cutout, and posters for Camorra, Field of Honor, After Hours, Heartburn. Not exclusively Cannon films, I like that. I didn’t see any Charles Bronson film, ironically.
After killing another mob hitman by pushing him into a massive CRT television, our protagonist goes to the movies, to see Otello with Placido Domingo in blackface!
Bronson is basically a Marty Stu, there’s no drama, he always wins! His Yojimbo shtick works, the gangs kill each other in the oil field battle, but there’s still 30 minutes of film left. The Lebowski dude is getting really suspicious now, but our protagonist seems none the wiser…
Of course he wouldn’t suspect a rich dude, but neither the producers turned pinko. It’s a setup, the old dude was away for months, the other guy was pretending to help him! But he supplied guns, surveillance devices, explosives.
Is this a Sicario situation, our protagonist a naïve Alejandro! He was just taking out the competition. He’s got dirty cops and the dead guy’s right hand man working for him. But he’s scared shitless of our protagonist nonetheless.
Having dirty cops bust him doesn’t work, our protagonist is handcuffed in the back of a police cruiser and still gets away without a scratch. So they kidnap his girlfriend, not knowing he’s a psycho, those cumdumpsters are dime a dozen, there’s a new one on every film, it’s worse than Bond girls.
Alas, our protagonist goes after the girl anyway, but of course she is murdered from the back in the big final shootout. Kersey kills the second in command when he misses a mirror, and since the girl is dead, he uses his Thumper to blow up the bad guy to smithereens, again.
That final shootout happens just outside a roller rink, but it’s actually that plaza outside the bank from Heat.
The other cop moves to assassinate our protagonist in his own home, but he is disarmed with a telephone, like a fucking dweeb. The protagonist will have to save the girl now.
Curious how these stories never rail against the existence of underground parking lots, only against women in the workforce. Speaking of women, there’s a scene where the hitman’s wife is getting dressed and she walks right into the screen with her big bazongas almost bursting out of her choir girl’s dress. She’s got some great lines too, badmouthing the husband beyond reasonable flirting.
There’s a gaping plot hole, where our protagonist just invaded the old dude house brandishing a gun in their face, but no charges are pressed. He would call the real cops, the dirty ones would get away, and Kersey would rot in jail.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.