Death Wish 3 (

1985

)

It took three tries and more than a decade, but Michael Winner finally figured out the appeal of the Death Wish movies. Why it took him so long, I’ll never know, because the reason why people like Death Wish should be pretty self-evident. It must be a case of Winner overthinking what turned out, on second glance, to be a very simple problem. Death Wish never needed to be a series that commented on complex moral and sociological questions, it just needed to be a film series where Charles Bronson gunned down a procession of criminal scumbags. So, into the bin goes the complex questions of civilization and savagery that the original film wrestled with, laid to rest alongside the notions of societal collapse that Part 2 brought up. To this, I say, good riddance. Freed from all that useless baggage, Death Wish 3 turns the series into the pulpy action film it was always meant to be.

Paul Kersey turned into a professional vigilante murderer after the events of Death Wish 2 (1982) and roamed across the country giving criminal psychos that evaded police capture the old Dexter Morgan treatment. It’s been a few years but he’s finally decided to hang up his six-shooter for good and return to live with a friend in NYC. However, this is still a Death Wish film, and being acquainted with Paul Kersey is pretty much a guaranteed death sentence (at least in the first 20 minutes of each movie), so Paul’s old friend is killed by a bunch of local hoodlums belonging to a street gang called The Creeps. The cops turn up just as Kersey arrived, and assume that he’s responsible for his friend’s death, taking him downtown and throwing him in the hold. A lot has changed in the NYPD since 1974 when they effortlessly tracked down the vigilante killer while staying completely inside the bounds of the law, as the police department is now a quasi-fascistic organization that beats suspects (where it won’t leave a mark) and routinely violates their constitutional rights. Hell, once Inspector Richard Shriker figures out who Kersey is (he was one of the cops that ran him out of town back in the original Death Wish (1974)) he makes it a point to hold Kersey in jail indefinitely. Kersey would never dare press charges, as any investigation will reveal just who he is and what he’s done better to rot in jail and see how things play out.

While in the can, Kersey gets on the bad side of Manny Fraker, the leader of the same Creeps that murdered his friend. What exactly Kersey does to antagonize him is anyone’s guess, because I don’t remember Kersey so much as looking at him funny, or doing much of anything in jail besides keeping his head down and quietly knocking the piss out of the prisoners that messed with him. Whatever the reason for Fraker’s hostility, the gang leader and a pair of his goons attack Kersey out of the blue. Kersey fights back, and even though Fraker and the creeps outnumber him, he gives as good as he gets. Before things turn deadly though, the fight is interrupted by the arrival of Fraker’s lawyer, who is there to get all the charges against the gang-boss dropped. Fraker heads out, but tells Kersey he’ll murder a little old lady once he’s on the outside, just for him. I’m starting to think this Fraker character is the baddie!

Kersey cools his heels in the hold for a while before Shriker turns up with a real hum-dinger of an idea. He wants to release Kersey under police surveillance and use him to clean up the streets of New York, starting with The Creeps. It will be just like how he used to operate, only this time he’ll be doing so under police supervision and protection. This would be a cool idea for a movie, so its kind of odd that as soon as he’s out of jail Kersey bails on it to do whatever the hell he feels like while Shriker sits on his ass until the climax. Indeed, at this point in the film I was pretty sure they were building up Shriker as the real main villain (his complete disregard for constitutional rights, his eagerness to use police resources to gun down suspected criminals, and his sinister sounding name all supported this idea) and was somewhat puzzled by his sudden disappearance. Indeed, not only is Shriker not a bad guy, he gives Kersey some much-needed backup in the film’s finale. This whole arch represents something of a lost opportunity, that could make a perfectly serviceable Death Wish movie in-and-of-itself. Fortunately, the real plot of the movie, which begins with Kersey moving into his dead friend’s apartment and starting his crusade against the creeps, is so much fun that I wasn’t overly troubled by the vestigial plotlines in the introduction.

The whole neighborhood has gone to hell ever since The Creeps (who are another of those late 20th century gangs with the demographics of Sesame Street) moved in and started their reign of terror. Now lightning-quick, constantly-giggling muggers snatch up every unsecured purse that comes into eyeshot while drugged-up psychos ransack apartments by climbing in through the windows. Good people are murdered for no reason, women are abducted and raped, and everyone lives in a state of constant fear lest they become the next victim. The police are too busy enforcing the traffic laws and making sure that nobody without a criminal record owns a handgun to do much of anything against the Creeps. Sounds like Kersey has got his work cut out for him.

Kersey starts off slow, building up allies and support in the neighborhood until he’s starting to resemble something akin to a folk hero. Despite the crime wave, there are a lot of good people still living in this hellhole of a neighborhood, and they are all pretty sick of standing by while The Creeps victimize them. In short order, he’s organized a neighborhood watch that is starting to push back against The Creeps. When Kersey shoots a few of the gangsters dead with his improbably large handgun (seriously, did Winner watch Dirty Harry (1971) and conclude that the biggest problem with that movie was that the hero’s pistol wasn’t big enough?) Fraker starts to get worried. He’s not just about to abandon his hold over the neighborhood though, so rather than backing off, he ratchets up the intensity of the crime wave. It’s enough to give Kersey pause, how many innocents will be spared if he just backs off? When he’s on the verge of giving up and leaving town with his new girlfriend (this has got to be in the running for the most pointless romantic subplot in action movie history), Fraker makes the real bone-headed move of killing her. Hasn’t he seen the last two movies? Nothing is more likely to give Kersey a thirst for blood than a dead woman of some significance in his life.

This sets the stage for the absurd climax, where Kersey and his neighborhood watch bust out a fucking Browning Machine and start a full-fledged war with Fraker and The Creeps. This glorious action scene occupies the last 30 or so minutes of the film and redeems almost all the shortcomings up to this point. The fight is pretty damn one-sided (Kersey is wearing a magical bulletproof vest that lets him shrug off rifle shorts and Death Wish 3 is nowhere near edgy enough to show innocent civilians losing in a fair fight with hardened criminals), yet the fight manages to be entertaining nonetheless. A big part of this is how effectively the bad guys have been built up over the rest of the film’s runtime. By the time we get to the climax, the audience is ready to see these jerks laid to rest once and for all. The exotic weapons used by the protagonists are themselves pretty damn exciting to see in action too. We get machine guns, that comically oversized pistol from before, a zip-gun and even a fucking LAW Rocket Launcher sprinkled throughout the fight, to say nothing of a variety of improvised booby traps and one deadly push broom!

As you might have guessed from the above description, the tone is, on the whole, much lighter than its two predecessors. Indeed, it’s riddled with jokes and sight gags, like the creep who falls victim to one of Kersey’s bobby-traps, losing two front teeth to the board. In the next scene, we hear the police calling in a search for a suspect with missing teeth. The soundtrack is full of audio gags as well, like the moment where an old cavalry charge plays while the camera flits across a painting of the old west. This tone-shift from the earlier films conflicts somewhat with the mandatory rape scene when one of Kersey’s neighbors is assaulted and dragged into a car by a gang of creeps. Sure, it’s pretty tame compared to what we get in Death Wish (1974) and especially Death Wish 2 (1982), but it stands out more against the goofy scenes surrounding it. It would have been better to ditch the rape scenes and replace them with some more conventional cheesecake scene. Maybe a gratuitous shower scene or a naked creep girl lounging about the creeper HQ (a couple of the lady creeps are on the cute side). Though I suppose after the success of the first two films, Winner might have assumed that gratuitous rape as an important part of the Death Wish formula.

Obviously, Death Wish 3 is simplifying the problems of urban crime. In the world of the movie, it’s almost like law-abiding citizens and creeps are two separate species for all they have in common. Back in real life, these creeps all have families, probably the same law-abiding citizens that they terrorize. They aren’t some invaders who have come to conquer and despoil a good neighborhood, but rather a byproduct of the poverty and culture of the neighborhood around them. In the world of the film, simply killing and imprisoning all the criminals will solve the problem, because the creeps effectively come from nowhere. Back in the real world, getting the criminals off the street is only half the problem, and you have to ask yourself how these criminal gangs came into existence in the first place and if the root causes to that problem have been addressed. One could complain about this inaccuracy but to do so ignores a crucial factor: Death Wish is under no obligation to be realistic. This movie is selling an escapist fantasy to its audience (which should be obvious once you get to the scene where Kersey mail-orders a fucking rocket launcher). It shows them a world where they don’t have to live in fear of the criminals in their midst and have the power to fight back and right the world around them even when the proper authorities remain aloof and disinterested in their struggles. This was the main appeal of Death Wish (1974) and Death Wish 2 (1982) but neither film fully realized and capitalized on this fact. Death Wish 3 fully embraces this, and during the course of its massive and thrilling conclusion shows us scores of regular citizens taking to the street to join Kersey’s war against the creeps. Ask yourself, when watching this sequence, what sort of kill-joy that would demand something so fun be saddled with un-needed realism?