Reel Politique: DVD Review, Death Sentence, Already Dead
Now that the dust has settled around Death Sentence (20th Century Fox Home Entertainment, 106 minutes, $29.95, 1.85:1, DD 1.5 English and Spanish, subtitles, two making ofs and 10 webisode making ofs; street date Tuesday 8 January, 2008), its similarity to The Brave One no longer feels relevant, and with the DVD now out, it’s possible to see the film more clearly. For one thing, it’s really a horror film, but an urban horror film like Psycho, one that addresses the horror of living in modern urban society. It’s still an unlikely project for Kevin Bacon, but seeing the film again, it seems much better; despite its familiar narrative elements, it is so visually strong that you could see why an actor would want to be a part of it, the way, for example, actors loved being in Leone films. When the film looks good, they look better.
Death Sentence stars Kevin Bacon as a man whose family suffers at the hands of a gang, and when the legal system can do nothing about it takes the law into his own hands, in the end becoming as much an animal as his prey. Bacon is hockey dad Nick Hume, who, on his way home one night, makes the mistake of stopping at at gas station in a “bad” part of town (how did they end up there? it doesn’t matter. What is important is that it is in visual contrast with the home movie world that opens the film, and that this gas station in a sense provides the visual cues for the rest of the film); within minutes, his son is dead, and he is severely injured by a group of wilding youths. In the aftermath of this event, Hume ends up taking the law into his own hands, tracking down the gang who participated in killing his son (and later his wife), while the law appears to take the side of the criminals rather than the victims. The film is based on a novel by Brian Garfield, the man who wrote the key vigilante text of the 1970s, the book Death Wish, to which this novel was something of a sequel. Death Sentence is directed by James Wan, whose biggest previous film was Saw, which probably prejudiced most critics against this film.
As mentioned, Death Sentence makes the obvious point that by engaging in his vengeance project Hume “becomes” like his enemies. Ian Mackenzie Jeffers’s credited script, however, offers no alternative to Hume’s audience-satisfying vigilante campaign. Society’s guardians offer no help, which was the problem with the original vigilante cycle of films beginning with Billy Jack. Death Sentence also has some Taxi Driver moments, Scorsese’s film being an art house vigilante test: Hume shoots a guy’s fingers off, is himself clipped in the neck at the end, and plops down on a couch post-bloodbath just like Travis. In a different coincidence, Death Sentence also echoes Bourne Ultimatum in having a car that is falling off a building used as a weapon.
Death Sentence is set up to provide a straightforward tale of vigilante justice with a patina of moralizing that is meant to divert the censors from the real purpose of the film. In reality, the males in the audience will feel a grim sense of satisfaction as Hume blows away the bad guys despite the fact that he ends up, as his final victim admits, looking just like them. In the experience, Death Sentence is much more tight in its narrative and solid in its visual technique and even less internally compromised in what it wants to say than you think it’s going to be, and it has some terrific action sequences, including a foot chase that ends up in an auto garage.
Fox Home Video offers Death Sentence in a fine wide screen transfer that matches the grittiness of the original, and comes with a handful of extras. Fox Movie Channel Presents: Making a Scene is a 10ish minute account of the key chase scene, which demanded some detailed camera operation. Fox Movie Channel Presents:Life After Film School, with Kevin Bacon is a 24-minute interview with the star by three film students. The deal seems to be that they can ask him anything they want (and of course gravitate to mundane queries) as long as they talk about Death Sentence for half the show. Nevertheless, Bacon is game and answers his questions with a sincerity that would make James Lipton proud. Next is 17-minutes worth of “webisode” makings of, that offer a mini-profile of director Wan, a charting of Hume’s “story arc,” the film’s cars, the villain, another about Wan, two about the garage car drop, one on the choreography, one on the chase scene, and finally an episode about the film’s dingy look. They can be played all at once individually. Finally, there are trailers for Hitman, Lake Placid 2, and The Comebacks.
If you read the box text of Already Dead (Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, 93 minutes, $24.95, 2.35:1, DD 1.5 English, French, Thai, and Spanish, subtitles, three deleted scenes; street date Tuesday 15 January, 2008) carelessly you might at first mix it up with Death Sentence, for in both a man’s family is desstroyed by a criminal, and he turns to private means of justice. But if Already Dead starts out a tiny bit like Death Sentence, it soon shows the influence of Saw, and even more so Hostel, with a bit of Star Chamber and Magnum Force thrown in, maybe a bit of The Game, all within the first 30 or so minutes, after which it settles into a straight-to-video version of Die Hard, garnished with a light reference to Assault on Precinct 13.
The film starts out feeling like a kidnapping movie, as a lone man with a big sports bag is directed from location to location by a disguised voice on a cell phone. But it turns out to be something different, as we learn from the inter-spliced back story. Tom Archer (Ron Eldard) and his wife arrive home one night from a function to discover the baby sitter attacked and their son dead. Archer remembers a tell-tale tattoo on the killer’s wrist. The police are unable to track down the killer. Now Tom, his family falling apart, has gathered all his money in order to pay for the services provided by a top secret group of ex-cops who do what the official police can’t: catch killers and provide a forum for the victims to do payback. Slight problem: when Tom confronts the man (Til Schweiger) tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, he doesn’t have the tattoo. Tom learned about the group from a psychiatrist (Christopher Plummer) recommended to him by his boss. The shrink is summoned when Tom is unwilling to proceed to kill the presumably innocent guy on offer. The way the ex-cops work it, it turns out, is to throw any old reprobate at the suffering victim, in order to enrich themselves over the person’s blind grief. In any case, Tom won’t kill the man in the chair, even under the influence of his shrink, and the rest of the film charts their efforts to escape the huge facility.
It’s an interesting premise under-explored at the cost of offering the faux excitement of the cat and mouse escape. The film feels very much like a straight-to-video effort, in its languorous pace, cost saving repetition of certain shots, poverty of cast, and use of one huge congenially empty location for the bulk of the story. It ends on a “cake and eat it” moment when the moral Tom declines to murder one of the shadowy group’s leaders, stating (in a cliche that actually led to the title), “I don’t need to kill you. You’re already dead.” But someone else does kill him, anyway, so the viewer gets both the moral purity of the hero and the satisfaction of knowing that a culprit is gone. The film does end, however, on an unexpected but satisfying coda. It’s well-acted by everyone.
The film comes in a fine wide screen transfer, with sound production better than it really needs. Supplements consist of three work-print-level deleted scenes, two of which are expanded versions of already existing scenes.