Death Wish II

It's a shame that the link to the end of the first film is pretty weak, and the characters are treated a bit too harshly, but I have to admit that I liked Charles Bronson as the vigilante a bit more this time than in the first film. It's also nice that it retained its explicitness, even though it basically follows one template. (25/03/2018)

Made eight years after the first Death Wish, the sequel is an even more feverish and radical display of fascist exploitation legitimising frontier justice. This time Bronson’s vigilante is in Los Angeles, which in the eyes of the filmmakers is no less a hotbed of crime than New York, which served as the setting of the first film. The protagonist’s quiet life with his new girlfriend is cut short when a gang of appropriately and obtrusively demonised goons find him. Unlike the first film, this time the screenplay does not problematise the matter of taking justice into one’s own hands; on the contrary, it populates the narrative almost exclusively with characters, including those from the ranks of the police, who agree with the protagonist’s biblical retribution and assist him, or at least say that the official legal system doesn’t work. The only character who disagrees with the elimination of the savage, racially profiled hooligans is the protagonist’s new girlfriend, who is thus portrayed as an irrational bleeding-heart liberal who fails in her traditional role as a pillar of support for the hero. It can be assumed that the sequel was made primarily as a desired contribution to the portfolio of the head of Cannon Films, Menahem Golan. Death Wish II is the first of a full range of sequels of older films by other companies that Cannon Films made, and it also fits precisely into the trend of dusting off old hits and hiring old acting stars that Golan, as a movie fan, used to admire at the cinema. On the other hand, the film’s hardline conservative tone and radical approach to rampant crime clearly tapped into the mood of the day. Let’s recall that major American cities at the time were struggling with rising crime, intensified by a flood of cheaper drugs, such as crack cocaine. Today, however, we know that it was not so much the radical zero-tolerance programmes as the much broader collaboration between social and police programmes that contributed to the fall in crime rates in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Nevertheless, the exploitation of the mood at the time made Death Wish II one of Cannon Films’ biggest hits, leading to three more sequels and making Charles Bronson both an action star and an iconic defender of conservative American values on the home front (as opposed to Chuck Norris, who defended those values on overseas missions). (28/08/2015)