Film Footle: Death Sentence

We wanted to see Atonement, but we got the times wrong, and this was on instead. Oy.

I think what makes Death Sentence so utterly annoying is the fact that a potentially powerful and moving storyline is reduced into an unfocussed tale that can't even be labelled a morality tale due to its lack of cohesion.

The story of a quiet, mild-mannered underwriter who sees his favourite son brutally murdered and goes on a vengeful rampage, this is to some extent an update of Charles Bronson's Death Wish series. One might hope that in chosing to update this there is a point, a focus, a message that the director wanted to deliver. I've yet to work out what that was.

Kevin Bacon is the damaged anti-hero, Nick Hume, but although he does a wonderful line in blank looks, tears, fear and confusion, his acute change of personality is barely explained. A reference to his son's killer being an "animal" who will cut some sort of legal deal for a short sentence goes some way to explain why he is able to kill, but not entirely. To go from loving family man to shaven-headed gangster takes some doing, and this is not explored. Equally, the film contradicts itself, showing young Brendon's killer as a worried youth being pushed into a "initiation killing", but then explaining that he's a 23-year-old "animal". Well, which is it? If he's both, then we need to spend more time with him, exploring his twisted family dynamic as a counterpart to Bacon's perfect picket-fence life. But instead the film resorts to clunky or inexplicable twists and graphic violence to cover its vague, meandering tracks.

After his first revenge killing, the gang inevitably turn on Bacon and some of the set pieces here are good if only because they have a vein of realism; people are genuinely hurt, run out of breath, and show fear, confusion and hatred. But then this all boils itself down into a ridiculous finale, where Bacon is transformed into merely another counterpart to the gang, laden with guns which we've criticised in the hands of the gangs but are now clearly supposed to find cool in the hands of the anti-hero as the long, indulgent scene of his head-shaving, bullet loading preparations shows us. And now that he has become the ultimate vengeance machine, he suddenly switches into superhero mode, rising to walk again from shots more deadly than those that floored him in the past.

There is no explanation or investigation of gang culture, of vengeance, of loss or of family. All this is is unflinching brutality with all the depth of oft-criticised video game Manhunt. Jordan Garrett's performance as Bacon's sidelined second son is excellent and deserves more time on screen, as does the exploration of how perfection is not always as it seems below the surface. There's nothing wrong with revisiting themes like that if you do it well; to be too lazy or scared to even bother is far more disappointing than a bit of hamfisted cod psychology.

Really, I wouldn't bother.