Stallone's Death Wish Remake
I saw this story a few weeks ago, and was a little worried about what Sylvester Stallone would do to Death Wish. I’m usually not a huge fan of remakes. Rarely are they an improvement to the original. In the case of Death Wish, it’s hard to imagine a remake even being of equal quality.
The recent Rambo movie delivered exactly in the way I hoped a movie like that would. The good guys were good, and the bad guys were really bad. When the good guys dispatched of the bad guys in the most brutal of ways, you cheered because they had it coming.
I respect that Stallone wants to do his own thing, but going after defense attorneys as opposed to street thugs seems like a bad move. Revenge stories need the villains to clearly be bad guys. I see that being a much easier thing to do with the common street baddie. Who knows though, maybe Stallone plans to have these lawyers slaughter a village of Burmese children in this Death Wish movie.
Another problem is not portraying the lead as a mild mannered, non-violent man. A big reason why the Death Wish series had legs was that the hero was someone you could relate to. People want to cheer on an “every man” type of character. Paul Kersey was a regular guy who had something terrible happen to him and was thrust into the role of a tough-as-nails vigilante. Charles Bronson was great as Kersey. He made the character work which made the story work. As for the remake, I’m really not sure how much I dig the “wolf has gone from wolf to wolf in sheep’s clothing back to the wolf” thing.
Stallone has huge shoes to fill. I know he can make an interesting movie that I’ll probably buy a ticket to, but If he strays too far from the spirit of the original Death Wish then maybe he should call his movie something else like, Vigilante Rambo or Rambo in the City.
Posted by chuck at February 6, 2008 7:38 AM
