Susan Granger’s review of “Death Sentence” (20th Century Fox)
September must be ‘payback’ month. In this overwrought revenge thriller, a mild-mannered, hard-working insurance adjuster, Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) with a loving wife (Kelly Preston) and two sons, Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) and Lucas (Jordan Garrett), seeks vengeance for a heartbreaking crime.
It all begins as Nick and teenage Brendan make a late-night stop after a hockey game at a gas station/mini-market, where some tattooed thugs blast the store clerk with a shotgun and – in a gang initiation ritual – one punk, Joe (Matthew O’Leary), attacks and kills Brendan with a machete.
Although Joe is arrested, the prosecutor offers a plea deal of only three to five years in prison. Furious that Joe won’t do hard time, Nick refuses to testify and takes justice into his own hands, stalking Joe and stabbing him to death. Problem is: Joe’s older brother, the gang leader Billy (Garrett Hedlund) declares that Nick has just “bought.a death sentence” for his all-too-vulnerable family.
In supporting roles, Aisha Taylor is the lone ‘voice-of-conscience’ detective, while John Goodman chews the scenery as a weapons dealer with paternal gangland ties.
Screenwriter Ian Mackenzie Jeffers loosely adapts Brian Garfield’s sequel to “Death Wish” which is directed by torture-master James Wan (the “Saw” trio). Despite one impressively photographed chase sequence atop a parking garage – credit the shaky cinematography of John R. Leonetti – it’s exploitive and overwrought with extreme violence, bound to turn off all but the most excessively blood-thirsty movie-goers. And its conclusion is an unabashed rip-off of Travis Bickle’s shaved head and blown-off fingers in “Taxi Driver,” punctuated by the hardcore, heavy-handed soundtrack and score. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Death Sentence” is a gritty, dismal 1 – as in one of the worst movies of the year.
