He's Judge, Jury, and Executioner!
Paul Kersey is back in New York, the scene of his first violent escapade as "the vigilante," to visit Charley, an old friend and fellow Korean War veteran. Upon arriving, Kersey is disgusted to discover that his friend has been living within the confines of a ghetto overrun by gang members hellbent on terrorizing, victimizing, robbing, raping, and murdering every last remaining tenant. Hordes of punks stand in groups outside harassing passersby; graffiti covers every wall. The few decent inhabitants of the neighborhood try to walk by unmolested. One of these victimized tenants is Charley, who suffers an attack/robbery from several punks and dies in Kersey's arms just as he arrives, and just before a swath of cops burst into the apartment. Kersey is initially blamed for the crime and taken downtown, where he has a confrontation with Manny Fraker, an albino face-painted punk who just happens to be leader of the gang responsible for Charley's death and all the other neighborhood terrorism. While being booked, Kersey also meets Lieutenant Shriker, a long-time member of the police force well aware of Kersey's past as "the vigilante." Shriker offers Kersey a proposal: he will turn a blind eye as Kersey takes revenge against all the punks responsible for Charley's death, so long as he provides information to Shriker's unit about all the gang's goings-on so they can move in, bust them, and take the credit. Kersey agrees, temporarily moves into Charley's apartment, befriends his old neighbors, and soon embraces his old vigilante ways to clean up the neighborhood the only way he knows how: beautiful violence.
Death Wish 3 was written by Don Jakoby (under pseudonym Michael Edmonds), who also wrote the underrated Blue Thunder, the silly but harmless Arachnophobia, and John Carpenter's Vampires, to name a few. More significantly, this sequel was a hat-trick move from director Michael Winner, who had directed the previous two installments in what would become one of the most marquee-famous action franchises in film history. To watch the first Death Wish, a film steeped in the gritty seriousness and social commentary most filmmakers abandoned following the end of the 1970s, and then watch this entry, which is the equivalent of a live-action "Itchy & Scratchy" cartoon, one would almost have to think that a brand new workman director had been brought on to continue the series, rather than the director who had proved himself capable of marrying a violent concept to a dramatic one and who would never dream of blatantly shitting all over the legacy he'd helped create. But no, the workman director approach wouldn't begin until Death Wish 5: The Face of Death, the final film in the series, and, not surprisingly, the worst. Winner, an actual filmmaker who had proven himself capable of delivering a serious-minded film, is amazingly the same man responsible for the outlandish series of events that a whole bunch of people managed to luck out and film and eventually name Death Wish 3; it's the silliest ninety minutes you're ever apt to see, for all kinds of reasons.
The unexpected tonal change in the Death Wish series very much mirrors that of the First Blood series, in that their increasingly absurd entries unfortunately/fortunately succeeded in not only becoming so exponentially removed from their first films' original ideals that they barely resembled each other beyond those familiar faces painted on their posters, but also (somehow) simultaneously established a precedent of cartoon violence for which those series would ultimately be known. As far as Death Wish goes, this can be likened to the involvement of the legendary Cannon Films, who produced the picture, and who are responsible for some of the most iconic b-action films of all time.
Interestingly and also a little sadly, Death Wish 3 would mark the final of six collaborations between director Winner and Charles Bronson, allegedly caused by Bronson objecting to the amount of violence that Winner secretly shot when the star wasn't on set. And in a fair and just world, it would be the artfully-minded individual endeavoring to maintain a certain level of respectability within his or her craft that would deserve the accolades, but the jury will be forever out on if Death Wish 3 was ever going to be capable of that certain level of respectability. The first sign of that would have been the script itself, which, to describe using modern terms, is a hyper-violent marriage of Grumpy Old Men and Home Alone, and which includes a third-act extended finale where more time is dedicated to people dying than people not dying. At no point do the inner-workings of Death Wish 3—not in any kind of actual way, nor in any "what-could-have-been?" hyperbolic kind of way—land anywhere within remote throwing distance of respectability. By then, Death Wish 2 had already proven that there was no recapturing the kind of zeitgeist-defining lightning in a bottle that the first Death Wish had obtained. Death Wish 2—in which Kersey's daughter was sexually victimized yet again, only this time dying an unnecessarily violent death, leading Kersey to go after an even higher number of gang members—may have raised the stakes as far as sequels demanded, but it did nothing to heighten, and in fact stunted, the artistic integrity for which the first Death Wish had strived. Having said that, Death Wish 2 is an exercise in restraint when compared to Death Wish 3, which is the '80s action film equivalent of the Grand Theft Auto video game franchise. It's just that, this time, the fatalities of Death Wish 3, whether they be of the innocent or guilty variety, were designed for audience exhilaration, not revulsion. And Winner wasn't bothered by all the vitriol tossed his way from critics, as this had been by design. In response to reviewers' condemnation of his fixation on violence and gore, he'd replied, "The public likes action. It takes their minds off the real world for an hour and that’s what entertainment is all about... It’s fantasy; people don’t watch a murder and then go out and commit one." He had also later stated, "I’d have Charles Bronson starring in Death Wish 26 if I thought it would make a profit."
If only.
So far, every film featured in Top Ten Murdered Men has been silly on some level, and some sillier than others (looking and smiling right at you, Face/Off), but Death Wish 3 comes dangerously close to being the silliest. Probably both ironic and unironic love aside, Death Wish 3 is kind of a masterpiece. It is Charles Bronson meets Merry Melodies. It is an unabashed series of vignettes in which people are killed in extremely disparate ways, loosely connected only by one common thread: they deserve it. Kersey knows they deserve it, the audience knows they deserve it, and the audience wants Kersey to make it rain bodies. And by gosh, does he ever. While the previous two Death Wish films, each in their own ways, wanted to make killing ugly, and revenge conflicting, Death Wish 3 wants you to eat your fucking popcorn and enjoy the carnage, you assholes. Out of sight is any sense of conflict. There are no warring minds re: revenge versus justice. Kersey barely needs a reason to begin unpacking his many weapons of mass destruction. Evidently he can't wait to do it. His ease at life-taking has come to define him. He's no longer haunted by the change that's taken place inside him, which turned him from mild-mannered architect/widower to a nonplussed bachelor/accomplished killing machine.
In the first Death Wish, Kersey was an amateur. He knew how to fire a gun, and could sometimes hit a target, but he was in uncharted waters. He was out of his element. It was his fury, heartbreak, and frustration with bureaucracy driving him, not his bloodlust. Same goes for Death Wish 2, which maintained the failure of the justice system, but which also established that, by then, killing for Kersey had become old hat. In Death Wish 3, "blowing a man's fucking brain off" is written on Kersey's daily agenda, next to picking up eggs and shaping his mustache with an X-ACTO knife. At no time does the audience ever feel like Kersey is in real, actual danger—he's become a pint-sized Terminator with puffy cheeks and grandpop emo hair. The audience wants to see him take lives in the same way they wanted to see Fred Astaire dance or Bette Midler sing. (In some respects, the audience even wants to get in on the action: see the official Death Wish 3 video game—one could argue a precursor to Grand Theft Auto— released in 1986 by Gremlin Graphics.) This pro-death stance isn't just relegated to Kersey himself, but to the attitudes of nearly every protagonist involved in the extermination of the city's punk populace. Lt. Shriker (Ed Lauter) shows no sense of hesitation whatsoever when he sics Kersey onto his city, encouraging him to take out as many "roaches" as he can—and this is before Shriker joins in on the hunt himself. Rodriguez (Joseph Gonzalez), one of Kersey's neighbors and whose wife was recently killed by the gang, skips the whole "conflicted" thing that the widower Kersey experiences in the first Death Wish and instead runs around as his assistant holding all the excess ammo being fed into Kersey's dick-extending M60 while occasionally blowing holes in men with a zip gun. Even Bennett (Martin Balsalm), who the film at least acknowledges as a veteran of World War II and therefore a bit more amenable to war, watches out the window as cars explode, dozens of gang members are shot down in the street, and buildings burn—and the look of pleasure, relief, happiness, and ecstasy present on his face is unmistakable. In previous Death Wish films, the vigilante murders had been committed in response to the frustration spurred by feelings of helplessness; in Death Wish 3, they are cathartic release. They are the unleashing pent-up blue balls of a mentally exhausted neighborhood so beaten down and regressed by daily victimization that rioting in the streets and blood in the gutter is tantamount to ejaculatory celebration. To come away with the message "violence isn't the answer" at film's end, where Kersey grasps his suitcases and heroically marches down a street littered with flaming cars, dead bodies, and screaming police sirens—it's the lone rider leaving that Old West town at sun-up—is to embrace your delusion. Death Wish 3 makes one thing very clear: violence works—works well, works often, and should be utilized for every possible situation. (Director Winner was attacked by critics in reviews for all of his Death Wish entries, but especially for Death Wish 3, and accused of encouraging private justice and vigilantism as a means for obtaining law and order. Though he would occasionally go on record to refute this, he had, contrarily, made donations to the "Guardian Angels," a self-professed vigilante group based out of New York.)
Death Wish 3 is also the first entry to realize that entire communities can joyfully join in on the bloodletting, and casts a swath of recognizable faces to watch Kersey's back or carry his ammo. Chief among them is Psycho's Martin Balsam, the elderly tenant who befriends Kersey, and who is not only at the end of his rope, but who also inexplicably owns the M60 that Kersey will use against dozens of gang members right around the time your pants suddenly feel little tighter around the crotch. Bringing up the rear is the immortal Ed Lauter as Shriker, the city lieutenant who has had enough of the violence plaguing his jurisdiction. And speaking of Lauter, and based on how Death Wish 3 concludes, the fact that no one thought to have Kersey and Shriker team up as pissed-off vigilante partners taking on one violence-plagued city at a time in a super-entertaining Death Wish 4 will forever haunt pretty much everyone who is just now realizing how tremendous such a concept would have been.
Death Wish 4: Shrike of the Kersey.
Death Wish 4: Kerse of the Shriker.
Regardless of your title of choice, just think of the poster!
All of the above is not to be misinterpreted as condemnation; rather, it's the reason Death Wish 3 was, and continues to be, as celebrated as it is. As an honorable sequel to an iconic film, it completely shits the bed, but as a piece of action cinema, its sheer entertainment value is both matched by and heightened because of how spectacularly it fails at preserving the commentary and conflict of the original concept that paved the way for its existence in the first place. Most audiences don't want to be preached to, they want to be titillated. But Death Wish 3 doesn't just want to titillate, it wants to mutilate as a means to titillate—and it's so, so good at that.
THE GOOD GUY
Paul Kersey. Self-confessed liberal. Conscientious objector. Amateur oral surgeon. Exuberant life-taker. Inmate beater. Stuffed cabbage consumer. Ice cream licker. Asshole bait. One-man apocalypse.
The introduction to this column mentions "the guy in a suit with a gun" films of the 1970s, which were a temporary stopping point between the spaghetti westerns of the 1960s and the gloriousness of the 1980s. These '70s comprised guys like Clint Eastwood, Roy Scheider, Lee Marvin, and even Walter Matthau, domestically, and blokes like Michael Caine, internationally, all doing their thing with a single pistol tucked somewhere between their tweed sport coat and brown turtleneck. Physically, the men were rather average, even scrawny, so they depended on their performances rather than ludicrous musculature to exude intimidation. Also born during this era was the realization that Charles Bronson, despite his tiny uncle-like stature and his strange anonymous hybrid of ethnicities (dude looks Mexican, Asian, and Native American all at once), was a remarkable bad-ass. Though he never achieved the same level of critical acclaim as his fellow suit-wearing bad-asses, as he often fell victim to just playing Charles Bronson on-screen, his name is one that often comes up in conversations akin to what this column is celebrating—he sort of one-man army who speaks softly and carries a giant fucking Wildey Magnum.
Bronson wasn't terribly happy during production or with the film's final product, but you'd never know it. There's an unmistakable gleam in his eyes during certain scenes—usually the ones that make clear the knowledge that he will destroy you with ease—and a certain affability seems to be draping over this once tragic character. It's understandable that Bronson likely became disenchanted by the exploitation of his Death Wish series after the first film had actually gone on to achieve a modicum of critical acclaim, but a part of him seems almost relieved that, though Death Wish 3 was probably beneath him, he was finally able to let Kersey have some fun. There would be no raped and ass-defaced housekeepers, and no suicidal daughters hurling themselves onto wrought-iron fences. There would simply be Kersey and his textbook mechanisms for removing life-forces from Planet Earth. Except for a couple of sad-face reaction shots, there'd be nothing so emotionally wrenching that it couldn't be overcome with a spring-loaded mouth smasher. His eyes sparkle as his cartoonishly large firearm arrives in the mail—one used for "big African game hunting"—even referring to it by its model name, "Wildey," which offers it a strangely feminine identity and an even stranger sense of sexual dependency. He proudly shows off his homemade booby traps to the curious and the intrigued, who delight in his sociopathic craftsmanship. Hell, he's no longer waiting for the little sons of bitches to make the first move, and is instead baiting them with shiny Cadillacs and expensive cameras slung around his neck as he takes a leisurely stroll around the ghetto licking his ice cream cone. But to make sure Kersey remains extra incensed, the film goes out of its way to introduce an arbitrary lawyer character (Deborah Raffin) just long enough for the audience to think Kersey might have found his replacement wife before she is quite violently killed, making Kersey's blood-thirst insurmountable.
Let it be known that none of this is something with which one should take umbrage: in case you missed it, this is Death Wish: Part Three.
THE BAD GUY
Manny Fraker. Gang leader. Rapist. Albino. Face-paint enthusiast. Geriatric killer. Prank caller. Gang members union delegate. Future impressionist art project.
Gavan O'Herilhy has one of those faces you just want to punch, which makes him an ideal person to play a villain. O'Herilhy has had a long career as an actor, but also sports one of those resumes filled with titles that don't sound all that familiar. His Fraker isn't exactly stand-out here, nor particularly memorable, but with him presiding over literally hundreds of gang members, all of whom commit most of the bodily harm and explosions, it's easy for him to become lost in the film and not make that big of a splash beyond his weird appearance. In keeping with the up-the-ante traditions of the sequel, Death Wish 3 works much better as having a sea of gang members serving as one foe rather than attempting to offer any of them a specific identity, but with Kersey working alongside his neighbors as well as members of the city police even though he's the hero, there needed to be a face to represent the threat of the bad guys, and what better face than the one that belongs to Gavan O'Herilhy...that you want to punch. (P.S. He is the son of actor Dan O'Herlihy, who also knows a little something about insane Part Threes: he played Conal Cochran in Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.)
Maintaining accidental Death Wish tradition, Death Wish 3 sports several different "Hey, it's that guy!"-type appearances from then-unknown recognizable people. In Death Wish, one of the roving and raping gang members was played by none other than Jeff Goldblum; in Death Wish 2, the rape honor went to Laurence Fishburne; and now, in Death Wish 3, it's Alex Winter's turn to sport the leather jacket and come on way too strong. (For fun, we can conclude with Danny Trejo in Death Wish 4 and Robert Joy in Death Wish 5, neither of whom rape, but both of whom turn into dummies before going full-inferno.)
THE CASUALTIES
The Bad Guys
Between Kersey and his new neighbors, Fraker's gang members endure the following: two are shot in the chest; one suffers a gigantic Wildey-sized hole; one turns into a dummy and is thrown out a window; sixteen are shredded by an M60, four of whom then crash their car and explode; 21 are Wildey-shot, one of whom falls out a window after turning into a dummy; four are clothes-lined off their motorcycles by chains and executed in a hail of bullets; one is thrown down the stairs; one is shot by a cop; one is shot by a zip gun; and two are shotgunned and broom-pushed out a window, respectively.
All in all, Kersey takes the lives of 43 assholes, including the main bad guy. That not only blows all the other Death Wish flicks out of the water twice over, but it's quite possibly a career high for Charles Bronson in general. Second banana Lt. Shriker even manages a respectable eight executions—and this coming from a guy who earlier in the film makes it apparent he can't take part in vigilantism by citing "[he's] a cop." Way to finally see the light, Ed Lauter!
The Good Guys
One gang member whose gang application was rejected is stabbed in the throat while another is pipe-beaten to death; one neighbor's wife is raped (thankfully offscreen) and her arm broken in the process, which somehow leads to her demise; one elderly wife has her throat cut; one old man is set on fire; two cops are shot by an MP5; and a married couple are set on fire and gunned down.
THE BEST KILL
Big, big fan of the one gang member who gets the spring-propelled dagger through the brain. Honorable mention goes to any death that results in the use of a dummy, because seriously, the amount of delight that comes from seeing what's clearly a dummy plummeting from a window and landing unconvincingly on a car windshield is the stuff of dreams.
THE DAMAGE
Well...nothing really. Had Kersey not run around with a bulletproof vest, he would have succumbed either from the switchblade in his kidney or the bullets in his back. The worst thing that happens to him is when he has sex with a lawyer and then she explodes.
Shriker takes a shot to the shoulder, which he dismisses as "just a nick" because Ed Lauter is Lord of the Bad-Asses.
THE BAD GUY'S COMEUPPANCE
Fraker takes a half-dozen bogus rounds to the chest, which are blocked by his own bulletproof vest, but Kersey thinks quickly by blowing him to smithereens with a rocket launcher. And even though the remaining gang members still outnumber the neighborhood citizens by roughly five-to-one, they all look really sad about this and silently agree to retreat. Good guys win! Thanks, absurd violence!
THE LINE
Death Wish 3 ain't exactly big on dialogue, as this is definitely one flick where the carnage does all the talking. Having said that, one of the best lines of the entire running time belongs to one word...
Kersey has just set up a Kevin McCallister-inspired booby trap involving a couple springs and a wooden plank on the floor near a window that gang members use to enter one particular apartment. This plank ends up cracking a gang member right in the mouth, who retreats soon after. The oft-victimized tenants look down at the objects now embedded in the wooden board. "What are those?" they ask, perplexed. "Teeth!" Kersey replies, grinning widely, his glee paramount. In this moment, no one has ever looked happier about mutilating another human being.
Worthy runner-up is Shriker shooting Alex Winter and then bellowing to Kersey, "I owed you that one, dude!"
THE VERDICT
In a way, Death Wish 3 kind of pre-staled the rest of the sequels that would follow (1987's The Crackdown and 1994's The Face of Death, which between the two of them would likely set around thirty-dozen dummies on fire). This second sequel had taken the series so far off the rails in terms of achieving any kind of artistic merit that there was no turning back, but it also painted itself into a corner, because unless Paul Kersey, who was now entirely out of family to be killed off, would be the one to perish at the hands of gang members and then come back from the dead to avenge himself before taking on an entire city with a tank and a collection of conflagratory weapons, the series was never going to top itself. That's not to say the final two Death Wish sequels aren't ludicrous, because they are (the latter has a scene where Kersey dispatches someone with a soccer ball bomb), but with their reduced body counts and with Bronson's evident evaporating level of enthusiasm for what the series had become, it's safe to say that Death Wish 3 was the last truly great chapter in the story of this vigilante—depending, of course, on what your definition of "great" actually entails.
