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Old 8th August 2017, 07:47 PM
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The Death Wish films were always wonderful at attracting controversy and criticism from large sections of the media. It seems that has continued with the remake, such as this article in the Guardian:

"There is a long and fine tradition of pointing out that Eli Roth’s new films don’t look very good. The cocksure writer, director, producer and sometime actor has spent the last 15 years serving up reliably polarising product from the gloomy, insidious torture-porn of Hostel to the garish sexpot thriller Knock Knock. Roth’s latest and most high-profile project – a long-in-the-works resurrection of the Death Wish franchise with Bruce Willis as the trigger-happy lead – has attracted even sharper criticism than usual. The launch trailer has sustained heavy fire on social media, called out for being “nakedly fascist” and being compared to “alt-right fan fiction”.

To mix animal metaphors, the trailer does make the rebooted Death Wish look like a depressing frog chorus of alt-right dog whistles. The setting has been shifted from New York to Chicago, a city currently struggling in real life to cope with a resurgent murder rate while being attacked by Donald Trump on a weekly basis. The alt-right like to paint the US’s third largest city as an urban hellscape overrun by predominantly black gangs fighting for turf. Purists might point to the fact that the new film’s location is paying tribute to Michael Winner’s 1974 original, which ends with Charles Bronson arriving at Chicago’s Union Station to continue his vigilante campaign. By fully setting their remake in Chicago, however, Roth and his producers are wading into real-life racial tensions (while filming mostly in Montreal).

The remake appears to stick to the man-on-the-edge premise of the original. Willis plays an affluent, middle-aged surgeon whose wife and daughter are victims of a savage home invasion. With the cops and courts seemingly incapable of punishing the perpetrators, Willis swaps scrubs for a hoodie to enforce his own brand of guerrilla justice, torturing low-life criminals in pursuit of information, gunning down a black drug dealer in broad daylight and, it is implied, becoming a folk hero in the process."

There is a bit more on the website, with quite a few hyperlinks.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/fil...m-bruce-willis
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Last edited by Nosferatu@Cult Labs; 8th August 2017 at 08:19 PM.
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