7 Responses to “Death Wish II”

1. 

   GoodBadGroovy

   March 26th, 2010 at 5:52 pm

   Another DW film, another bad ass closing shot. I enjoyed this one as well, it starts off seemingly like a rehash of the first, but I like that it blossoms out from there into something different. I love the return of the NY cop, the mayor sending him out to LA to cover up the fact they let Kersey go, it adds this growing myth to his character as a badass vigilante.

   The final 15 minutes are really well put together, seeing Kersey gain acess to the hospital, the brutal fight and excellent death of the villian, then his desperate race home to his fiance and her discovery of what Kersey has been doing. It’s a lot more downbeat than the first film in that respect, Kersey seems a lot colder in this film, his relationship seems much more like a cover story, manipulating her. And by the end he’s left with nothing other than his vigilantism.

2. 

   DukeTogo

   October 30th, 2010 at 4:47 pm

   I find this movie to be a bit darker than the first one. One twist I find original is in the end,when Kersey disguise himself as a doctor to kill one of their patients. it´s a twist because usually only the villains are so dumb to try anything like that.

3. 

   neal2zod

   September 3rd, 2018 at 6:19 am

   Boy am I glad the “NC-17” version that was on Amazon Prime turned out to be the R-rated version – I decided to finally binge-watch the Death Wish franchise but had heard so much about the infamous rape scenes here that it’s always scared me away. So good thing both scenes are edited to shreds (the second one is barely shown)- what’s left is surprisingly more similar to the over-the-top Death Wish 3 than I expected – sure it’s smaller-scale and not as gonzo, but the same wacky cartoonishness is on display here – the Robcop-esque gang of creeps is amazing, and the way people over-sell getting shot is worth the price of admission (gotta love that green stuff Fishburne inexplicably spits out during his amazing death). And man, what a surprisingly upbeat, feel-good ending that wouldn’t have quite worked the same had we had to witness two horrible gang rapes earlier. This was surprisingly better than its reputation.

4. 

   Felicity

   October 27th, 2022 at 9:50 pm

   “Death Wish IV” is my favourite of the series. It’s the most Golan-Globus-y, and I like all the cool disguises and props Kersey uses to infiltrate the places where he can get at the gangsters. There’s a wide variety of colourful locations. We even get to see him at his architect’s desk. The opening scene is cool too—and it’s always long enough between viewings of it that I forget how it goes and so it’s a fun surprise every time.

5. 

   dreadguacamole

   October 28th, 2022 at 1:56 am

   The later movies kind of run together in my mind (it’s been a long long time!) but yeah, 3 or 4, definitely. They play like parodies.
   If I had to pick, though, I’d go with the game version of three that came out for the Commodore 64, which I was shortly obsessed with in my early tweens: There are only thugs, policemen, whores and grannies on the streets, and it’s your job to do as Kersey does with machineguns and bazookas.
   The level of detail is insane for its time – paramedics come out of the sides to drag away bodies, policemen start shooting at you if you kill too many police or grannies, and -this blew my little mind and was an endless source of amusement for me and my sister- grannies would often fight back with their purses and leave thugs lying in a puddle of blood on the floor.
   The music is a classic C64 banger, looking up videos just now flooded me with nostalgia.

   1

6. 

   The Undefeated Gaul

   October 28th, 2022 at 4:39 am

   Long live C64 music! Those were the days… I never played Death Wish 3 but the look and sound of it bring back memories all the same.

7. 

   Fergus mac Róich

   July 21st, 2026 at 9:40 am

   “Death Wish” is such a fun vigilantism series, but a recent watch once again reminded me how cartoonish this “genre” almost always is.

   I’ve watched the probably newest vigilante film – the recent surprise Internet hit, “Citizen Vigilante” (my surprise was that Uwe Boll had been constantly making films since I last read about him about 15 years ago), and while it is largely just a mediocre and plodding revenge “clickie”, there is an interesting aspect about it. I doubt that it is intentional, because, after all, the film was made by Uwe Boll – maybe someone who worked with him pushed it in? – but it is there.

   That interesting aspect is the vigilante himself – it’s how odd and genuinely non-fitting he is as a character. Not “non-fitting” in that laughable way that they have in all US productions about vigilantes, where the distribution propaganda will require that the vigilante must be someone “to identify with for the audience”, so he is in reality nigh-perfection, closer to soap operas than reality, with some minor flaws, “wounds” that can be healed – perhaps by a touch of an understanding woman, although maybe he will tragically reject her in the end, or maybe someone will tragically sacrifice, or maybe he will not find that stability happiness because it is not his destiny, it is his curse, bla bla bla.

   But Boll’s guy is what a real life fellow of this kind might be. He is not “a kind man who was hurt”, he is not “a complex martyr”, he is not “looking for redemption”, he is not “punishing himself by saving the world”, etc., etc. He is odd, wooden, cold, devoid of empathy, empty, full of weird quirks that are most certainly NOT “endearing” and “for the audience to identify”. He is played by that US outcast, but he is very much not the US film portrayal of a vigilante. There are arguably more characteristics with which the US audience could identify in some of the criminals than in him.

   And THAT is the interesting part of “Citizen Vigilante”. That if real vigilantes started showing up, they will not be like the popular US fiction characters, the wonderful brooding Batmen, the likeable “I can change him” Punishers, the “I can so understand his tragedy and his plight” Kerseys, and all those others. No, they would be a mixture of total social outcasts who are already criminal themselves, and odd, cold, GENUINELY psychologically maladjusted characters like the “hero” of “Citizen Vigilante”. Not dream boys to go on glistening wall posters, but guys from the pages of Maudsley, Sims and the Oxford Handbook. I would say that this is a good issue to point out, but as I mentioned, it’s Uwe Boll, so I cannot be sure that anything about it was intentional.

   I’ve often read how they breathlessly claim in USA that Batman, Bruce Wayne, is maladjusted, socially outcast, misfit, bla bla bla, and I would always laugh at it. Of course Wayne is in reality a perfect ideal, so clean, moral and cartoony that he should be wearing a white crisp shirt with a galstuk cravat tied around it, red, green or blue, depending on one’s country. Boll’s take is actually much, much closer to what a real Batman might have been. If a rich guy really started dressing in black and killing criminals in secret, he would be nothing like sweet samaritan boy Brucie, and much more like this odd “hero” of “Citizen Vigilante” (he did have a name, I think, not that I remember it, or that it matters).

   If he reminded me of anything, it was a character from a GAME, actually, one that one of our studios designed back in 99 in København (and that, from what I understand, a US studio owns now and has driven into mud with awful remakes and sequels that completely changed the character and everything else), “Codename 47”, who was (at least originally) just an empty shell, too – e.g. out to kill a criminal target, but couldn’t care less if a girl was being tortured to death in the next room, because that wasn’t his task at the moment.

   The only vigilante fiction that I recall actually doing anything close to it earlier was Alan Moore with his Rorschach vigilante from the comic book “Watchmen”. Rorschach is a smelly short odd bloke with a plethora of mental problems (and physical ones, too), as far from glamour as one can get. AFAICR, Moore even said that he had deliberately made him as off-putting, ugly and mentally ill as possible, and “smelling of piss”, to stress how un-glamourously un-sellable (or, rather: more difficult for the marketing propaganda to lie about before selling) such a real life character would be. And Moore is, again, not from USA – so perhaps we just tend to have a continentally shared more realistic look at fictitious vigilantes than they have had in USA. Or maybe it was just coincidental.