Stale, gore-filled drama a serious waste of time

By Dan Moore

Published Sept. 11, 2007

"Death Sentence" is, nominally, a remake of "Death Wish," the Charles Bronson exploitation movie that pandered to our general desire to see bad guys get what's coming to them, typically out the end of a sawed-off shotgun. "Death Sentence" has decided that that common denominator is just too high. The latest from — who else? — the director of "Saw" simply panders to a taste for blood. It's blood and crappy family melodrama.

How inauspiciously does "Death Sentence" begin? It apes the opening of "Alpha Dog," quite possibly the worst movie of the last 10 years. In lieu of good acting as exposition, director James Wan shows home movies of Kevin Bacon (in the Charles Bronson role) and his soon-to-be-deceased family. Someday this will be a good device. Someday a skilled director will utilize this form of jackhammer foreshadowing to great effect.

Someday is not today. James Wan is not that skilled a director.

Whenever the terrible pacing begins to shamble forward to some kind of suspenseful conclusion, he kills it with needless family-drama subplots and terrible, adult-contemporary background music. The falseness with which Bacon's family interactions play out, the rote dramas and sappy moments will all make you yearn for the mindless violence.

It comes when Bacon's son dies in fulfillment of one of the oldest of old urban legends, in which flashing one's brights at a car leads to your untimely gang murder.And what a gang! Driving around in two donked-out Mustangs, they look and act like a troupe in some ultra-violent retelling of "West Side Story" when they're not wielding bloody machetes.

Wan doesn't help matters. His horror director's taste for asinine hideouts places the dramatic climax in the gang's lair, an abandoned insane asylum. When he's not making his deadly antagonists look ridiculous, he's filming the action in an awful shaky-cam haze that makes it impossible to determine who's stabbing whom, or he's trying, inexplicably, to push emotional buttons with his sausage fingers.

The movie comes to life only for brief moments. There is one remarkably inventive chase scene, a fast-paced sprint through a parking garage that ends in the back seat of a '96 Ford Taurus, and Kevin Bacon plays his badly-written role with aplomb, teetering on a suburban tightrope over his vigilante desires until Wan stumbles over it and turns the movie into "Home Alone" with bullets. There's even an excellent, "Deadwood"-esque cameo from John Goodman as the leader of the gang.

I would say James Wan should stick to straight horror, but that would mean more sequels to "Saw." Whatever it is he should be doing, it shouldn't involve leavening his jump-cuts and gory escapades with tearful wives and sad little brothers or gritty realism.

If you like watching people lose limbs and internal organs, walk in for the last 30 minutes. If you're a masochist, the real horror begins when the doomed family rings in the New Year underneath the opening credits.