Death Wish 2018 has a low rating due to politics
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by Blender Dumbass
Aka: J.Y. Amihud. A Jewish by blood, multifaceted artist with experience in film-making, visual effects, programming, game development, music and more. A philosopher at heart. An activist for freedom and privacy. Anti-Paternalist. A user of Libre Software. Speaking at least 3 human languages. The writer and director of the 2023 film "Moria's Race" and the lead developer of it's game sequel "Dani's Race".
17% Rotten Tomatoes score. The movie got to be shit, right? Well when it comes to the Eli Roth's 2018 Death Wish ( the remake of the 1974 film with the same name ) you are not quite correct. In my estimate the film should be no less than 60%, based on its execution. Eli Roth is a good enough director to pull something like this off. And you can see that he is trying. The actors are also good. And the music by Ludwig Göransson is really fucking good. I mean this is the same guy who did the music for Tenet and Oppenheimer. He is really fucking good. Watching the movie, I saw that the movie is arguably a lot more watchable and a lot more satisfying than the 1974 original. What is different, is that the 1974 original was made in 1974. And since then the politics have changed. ↩ Reply
The original 1974 film is unapologetically pro guns. And by 2018 guns became a big moral panic issue with school shootings and stuff like that. The government of the United States wanted to finally do something about this crisis and proposed changing the core part of the constitution to try and do something about it. So the public obviously got divided into pro-guns and anti-guns. And the vast majority of movie-going liberals were on the anti-guns camp. And that is when Eli Roth decides to remake Death Wish? Is he fucking stupid? ↩ Reply
Eli's version is not changing anything about the message of the first film. The guns are still good. And the main character is still a hero for using those guns to shoot bad guys. Apart from that Eli Roth and the screenwriter Joe Carnahan did change a few things. ↩ Reply
First of all the movie isn't starting slowly. In the original you need to wait a hefty chunk of time, watching the main characters happy, before the attack scene ( which sets everything in motion ) happens. In the 2018 remake the first scene is tense and intense. We watch a police officer speeding through the city with a partner, who is shut. It is a nice hook. It is tense. And it establishes the main theme of the film. All at once. And with a surprisingly descent action direction from Eli Roth. ↩ Reply
Then, unlike in the original, the main character actually gets to revenge his family. In the original, those were just some goons. And they could not be found, so the main guy starts killing random goons. Making it a sort of Superhero movie. In this film it is a full on revenge story. Yes he goes for a few random goons at first. But ultimately, his mission is to kill the 3 motherfuckers that fucked his daughter and killed his wife. ↩ Reply
Being a horror director, Eli Roth is making a few strange decisions that I found to be rather interesting. I personally don't think that the movie is worse because of those decisions. But I could see how the general public, or the critics would look at it as something unnecessary. Eli Roth stages multiple horror sequences in the film. For example, the attack scene in the beginning of the film. In the 1974 film, it is trying to recreate a similar attack scene from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange. In this film it is just a normal horror scene. ↩ Reply
And then when our main character starts killing other people, the violence is just poetically fetishized. It is 100% an Eli Roth movie, when it comes to all the nasty ways people die in the film. And it is kind of jarring, because it is trying to be a sort of action thriller. But the kills are so much out of a slasher movie, that you get whiplashed. ↩ Reply
When it comes the lead actor Bruce Willis a lot of people roll their eyes immediately. He was once good. He was good in the 90s. But by 2018 he was making so much mediocre crap, just to pay his bills, that nobody took him seriously anymore. His last few good films were like in 2012. Is he bad in this movie? Not really... No. He is very good. Yes, he looks a bit tired. But that's about it. He is still trying and still got the charisma going. And in my opinion, even though it was not a complicated casting decision, Bruce Willis, in this movie, works. ↩ Reply
Was Eli Roth making a gun propaganda piece? I start to suspect that, yes, he was. Based on other movies I see from his, the motherfucker is rather conservative. And he is also quite nihilistic. So for him to make a pro-gun movie during the height of gun-violence, is the kind of thing I would expect from him. ↩ Reply
Reading the Quentin Tarantino book Cinema Speculation I started looking at those kinds of movies from a different lens. Tarantino is, first of all a friend of Eli Roth. And he also expresses a great amount of conservative rhetoric in his films. And yet somehow, despite that, Tarantino doesn't get the hate. And here is why... ↩ Reply
He believes ( taking as an example a Don Siegel film Dirty Harry ) that a good filmmaker is one that can successfully "corrupt the audience". The book goes into a lengthy discussion about how Siegel's film isn't a conservative propaganda, while the rest of the world sees it as a Nazi advertisement piece. But in the end of the day the quality he finds in this film is that it was rather successful at making people understand something that was taboo to understand. Or in other words. It was successful at corrupting the audience. ↩ Reply
Here is a thought experiment for you. We can all agree that Cannibalism, for example is bad. You should not eat people. You could make horror films where there are cannibals. But cannibals always need to be bad. Then let's say that there comes a movie with a such a good argumentation for why cannibalism is good actually, that people actually change their mind about the subject. Isn't that movie a fucking genius piece of art, if it can do that? If it can actually pull this off... ( By the way Luca Guadagnino ( a very liberal filmmaker ) made such a movie about Cannibals in 2022 called Bones and All. And Eli Roth took a crack at that challenge ( somewhat unsuccessfully ) in his The Green Inferno ). ↩ Reply
If that is true, then the quality of the movie could be judged not by its message, not by it's technical execution, but by the execution of the message. Does the movie achieve what it wants to achieve? If the movie has a message, do the people watching it end up believing it? Do they go out of the theater agreeing, or do they go out angry? ↩ Reply
The original Death Wish from 1974 was way more successful on that regard than the attempt by Eli Roth, even though Eli tried to update the movie with the modern talking points on the matter. And that is why I also think The Green Inferno simply makes you think about things. While Bones and All actually makes you share the psycho-sexuality of eating your loved one alive. I probably need to make a psycho-sexual analysis of Luca Guadagnino... ↩ Reply
Happy Hacking!!! ↩ Reply
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