Society's fears fuel return of revenge movies
Genre had its last heyday in the 1970s and '80s
It's a line full of meaning for Bacon's character, who witnessed his son's brutal murder and now is intent on wiping out the urban gang that did it.
But its allusion to warfare may also be a clue — subtle as a shotgun blast to the face — as to why revenge movies are making a comeback this season, as politics bleeds over into another film genre.
On Aug. 10, City Lights Pictures, a microdistributor in Manhattan, released the indie feature "Descent," in which Rosario Dawson plays a date-rape victim who exacts her own harrowing retribution. That film opened only on two screens, in New York and Los Angeles. But Fox takes the theme to cineplexes nationwide today, with "Death Sentence," directed by James Wan, who created the "Saw" franchise and now brings his trademark gruesomeness to a different genre.
And on Sept. 14, Warner Brothers follows with a slick New York vigilante thriller, "The Brave One," directed by Neil Jordan, in which Jodie Foster stars as a Central Park Jogger-like victim who is radicalized into a latter-day Bernhard H. Goetz.
And a tangled web of copyright holders appears to be the only obstacle to a remake of "Death Wish," the 1974 Charles Bronson hit that spawned four sequels, according to Brian Garfield, who wrote the book on which the original was based.
The genre is also finding new audiences overseas. One of the most successful, and controversial, British films of the year so far was "Outlaw," which critics likened to both "Death Wish" and "Falling Down." It stars Sean Bean as a returning Iraq veteran who forms a gang that metes out deadly justice in a country plagued by violence and crippling political correctness. "Where we are in London I think is where New York was in the late '80s," said the film's director, Nick Love, by phone from a boat off Sardinia. "There's lots of gangs and shootings. It didn't use to happen in England. People are feeling impotent. There is a feeling of like, 'Someone, do something about this."'
Garfield, who also wrote the novel that inspired "Death Sentence," said that he had long since moved on to other kinds of material, but that he understood why audiences today might be ready for a new wave of cathartic, rough justice at the movies. "People are just sort of simmering with the kind of anger that they can't really define, and this kind of movie gives them some kind of release," he said.
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Same Old Stuff | Sept. 2, 2007 at 9:05 p.m.
