Death Wish 3 (1985)
SMALL SPOILERS
With quasi-police acceptance a vigilante (Charles Bronson) cleans up a rough neighbourhood.
Oh boy, what a strange movie. It’s scary this was made by adults as it depicts the world view of a five-year-old. There isn’t even the slightest hint of reality. It’s naive to a stunning degree with ludicrous thugs and useless law enforcement that are better at harassing the honest citizens than in dealing with the street scum. The thugs openly harass, rape and murder with impunity while also looking incredibly silly with face paint and costumes. It’s conceptually, artistically and technically incompetent and clumsy. Michael Winner has no taste and so the whole thing is a parade of bad taste. The visuals are ugly. He loved distorting wide-angle lenses, putting objects in foregrounds and cheesy zooming. The camera zooms a lot in this film. It looks grotesque and amateurish. Also the editing was sometimes a bit choppy. The music (by very talented Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page) is hideous and deeply unsubtle. It’s a perfect package of horrible music, ugly visuals and childish thinking.
The script is dumb and clunks like crazy with bad dialogue. The action climax goes on so long it becomes almost tedious as there’s no plot development happening; and it’s not like it’s inventively filmed or the kills are clever.
There is a slight romantic subplot buried briefly in the film. It’s a half-arsed obligation the makers obviously weren’t interested in. The female character is given bizarre dialogue and actions (she travels by taxi to meet Bronson and asks him out on a date after only once briefly meeting him and exchanging about two non-flirtatious words in the police station). She is then cruelly killed in a cynical way (in a ludicrous fireball car crash that was so over the top I laughed out loud) and not referred to again as she’s forgotten as an irrelevance. It’s not a feminist movie.
Bronson is competent, and strangely charismatic, as a tough guy even though he’s too old and creaky to be convincing as someone who can beat up so many thugs in hand to hand combat. My distaste for the movie doesn’t come from a wishy-washy liberal ‘let’s all hug the criminals’ point of view. My issue is just that it’s so supremely silly and too farfetched with zero hints of real world complexities. The main cop even starts running around the streets shooting thugs with Bronson at the end. The thing is: it’s so jaw-dropping-ly bizarre and comic book simplistic with a truly weird worldview that it becomes entertaining just for how bad it is. It’s almost so bad it’s good. There’s a decent pace to it as well, which is always helpful to make a film painless to sit through. It was bad, very bad, but it was also entertaining for being so gonzo with its crudeness. It plays like Michael Winner’s perverse sexual fantasy that combines politics and violence.
ITV4 today in HD at 10.55pm-12.45am.
Sky 120
Virgin 118/178
Freesat 117
You have to see it for yourself.
You’ve sold it to me. I found Sly StAllone’s ‘Cobra’ a hoot of reactionary trash aesthetics. Chatles Bronson’s ‘Kinjite’ is also remarkable for the bone headed bravado. Let’s also hear it for “Who Dares Wins”, bits of which are so great, I have put on YouTube so they can be appreciated for themselves. I’d rather have this than merchant-ivory.
Does that include the clip where a band formed largely of Fairport Convention members rocks out in Union Chapel?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N1POOwe3Hs
Thats the one. My service to humanity. the dance routine is also a corker (starts at 20:20):
the whole movie is here
By coincidence I’ll be at Union Chapel tonight. Well, I say by coincidence but I’m going there deliberately to see The Unthanks.
A main location for Death Wish 3 was the old Lambeth Hospital and streets surrounding. I was at uni at he time in nearby Elephant and Castle and we became familiar with New York Police Dept signs on the already quite mean streets. Local pubs all claimed Bronson had been in for a pint and was a smashing fella. Fully in agreement it’s a shoddy rubbish film from a crap director. Remember what Leone did with Bronson and think what someone like Tarantino could have.
The South Western Hospital, wasn’t it, down near the source of Brixton High Street? The Lambeth was the General Lying In Hospital as was, for post childbirth, between St Thomas’ and Waterloo. (The GLI became a nurses home where I had a good relationship with a side-widow into the street, to bypass the door man.) The South Western with it’s long corridors has appeared in nearly every hospital drama since that time, closing as a hospital in the 80s, living on as a film set even to this day: I’ll swear I recognised it from Trust Me s2, before I turned it off in exasperation with the plot and the acting.
FYI Amazon have the Leone Dollar trilogy on Blu-Ray for £5.91 at the moment.
Trump’s favourite movie is The Dark Knight Rises. He sees himself as Bane, a criminal mastermind, even though Bane was actually a mere lackey. For a woman.
This article explains all:
https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2019/apr/11/donald-trump-thomas-hardy-the-dark-knight-rises-christopher-nolan-batman
I watched my ITV4 recording yesterday of DW3. It’s a fun movie of some note. Illogical, stupid, badly made and distasteful. It’s some kind of trash masterpiece.
Death Wish 3. One of the greatest films ever made. I shout this out proudly and without a trace of irony. “He shot the Giggler man…He shot the Giggler”.