Revenge fantasies always make up a healthy percentage of film plots, for the cinema is the only place we’ll ever know what its like, though vicariously, to beat someone’s brains in with a baseball bat. Or knife them in an alleyway while they put out the garbage. Or stalk them through an abandoned hospital and blow them away with a long range hunting rifle. All this and more can be yours to consider for the price of admission to the new film Death Sentence.



Based loosely on novelist Brian Garfield’s original sequel to Death Wish, which was turned into the 1974 Charles Bronson film, the set-up is rather simple. A wrong place, wrong time stop for gas by Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon), ends up in the murder of his beloved elder son Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) in a gang initiation kill. The banger is caught, but with only Nick’s eyewitness testimony to build a case on, the DA’s pushing for a plea. At this point Nick decides to take the law into his own hands, but one kill compounds another.



Confucius once wrote, "Before embarking on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.” Naturally, of course, this thought is lost in all the nonsensical gore and death. On this count, they have a master at the helm in the form of James Wan, originator of Saw and the man that made “torture porn” part of the common vernacular. He knows how to ratchet up the tension and execute suspenseful sequences that get your heart-pumping good, but unfortunately for Wan, the film is horribly deficient in the basics, the part that happens at script level.



The villainous gangbangers are so cliché ridden and badly drawn that they are easy confusable and interchangeable. They’re like the Turnballs without any style, but certainly nobodies going to confuse them with the Baseball Furies, or any of the other colourful gangs in The Warriors. They’re skinheads without any ideology. Heroin freaks without any seeming lasting consequence. Any Law & Order episode offers the same kind of background character; a smart-mouthed, internally weak and cowardly dope fiend that helps the detectives find the next biggest fish.



Bacon is always winning and he does great work with what he’s given, his turn in personality is certainly more believable here than it was in Hollow Man. But the main banger played by Garrett Hedlund is so not scary that you can’t understand why a pencil pusher like Bacon’s character couldn’t kick his ass with one brief case clad hand tied behind his back. Aisha Taylor joins in the fun to put her stamp on the thankless, ineffectual cop role, while John Goodman slums as a sweaty, beef-eating local arms merchant.



I think it would have been more interesting to explore the psychology of the surviving family members rather than just getting them out of the way so that Bacon can do his business. The film does occasionally dips into the family’s feelings of loss and the recriminations that come with survivor’s guilt. Did I say psychological thriller? Yeah right! I must thinking about some other brutal revenge picture.



Ultimately though, I think that this film satisfies in a way intended and any one that wants to see Bacon not gonna take it anymore will undoubtedly leave the theatre in a most satisfied state of mind. And remember, the next time a gang member savagely takes your golden son, you take the law into your own hands and don’t take them to court.