Death Wish 5: The Face of Death (

1994

) ½

Unlike previous entries in the series, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987), was not a commercial success. Sure, it made money at the box office, but the margins were small enough that it was hardly worth the effort. Personally, I would blame the loss of director Michael Winners for the disappointing returns more than anything else. Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) lacked the grittiness of the original movies, and the goofiness of Death Wish 3 (1985), and consequently felt like just another generic action movie. This explains why the bosses at The Cannon Group decided to shelve the series more or less permanently after episode four. However, the Death Wish series, while lukewarm at the box office, enjoyed considerable success when it came to VHS rentals (indeed, I can think of few films more perfect for the a 80s, early 90s Pizza, beer, and movie night than Death Wish 3 (1985)). These profits were marginal, to say the least, but started to look awfully tempting to former Cannon Group bigwig Menahem Golan when his new production company, 21st Century Films, fell on hard times in the early 1990s. I would say that it was another unnecessary sequel, but all of the Death Wish Films after the first entry were totally unnecessary. Yet, there is something especially pointless about Death Wish 5 when compared with its predecessors. By the mid-1990s, Death Wish had lost its raison d'etre, as for the first time since the Kennedy Assassination, violent crime in America was on a downward trend. Hell, even New York, long held up as a wretched hive of scum and villainy, was beginning to show signs that it might be fit for human habitation sometime in the near future. Death Wish was a series built on the fantasy of taking revenge on the criminals that wronged you or your family, and in 1994, this fantasy was beginning to lose its hold on the American imagination. Death Wish 5 could not rely on that visceral thrill the way that previous entries in the series could, in order to succeed it would have to live and die on its merits as an action movie. Not the best prospect when your director was a man better known for dramas and your star was in his 70s! Indeed, under the circumstances, its a miracle that Death Wish 5 is as good as it is.

Paul Kersey, has once again gone into retirement and shacked up with a beautiful younger woman and her teenage daughter, because it worked out so well in Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987). This time his new girlfriend is Olivia Regent, an acclaimed fashion designer, and the divorced wife of a vicious mobster Tommy O'Shea. Tommy is handling the divorce poorly, to say the least, and is coping with his grief by muscling in on his wife's fashion design business. Not only does he use the business as a front for laundering his dirty money, but he even has some input on the fashion designs themselves, demanding that the company pivot to a chain-mail bikini line al la Red Sonja. When Olivia talks back, Tommy thinks nothing of manhandling her, though the old guy must still be at least a little sweet on her because he gets downright vicious when any of the other employees question his decisions. In one case, going so far as to maim one of them with some handy power-tools. Olivia is getting really tired of this shit, so after speaking with Kersey, she decides to testify against Tommy with the help of District Attorney Brian Hoyle. Unfortunately, Tommy has a mole working for him inside the D.A.'s office, and when he finds out that his ex-wife is planning to rat him out, he's understandably upset about the situation. So, he sends his top hit-man, Freddie “Flakes” Garrity, to intimidate her back into silence. Garrity dresses in drag and corners her in the woman's bathroom at a fancy restaurant, where he complains about how unfair it is that she has such beautiful hair while he is cursed with chronic dandruff (hence his nickname) before plowing her face into the mirror and leaving her permanently disfigured. This has the opposite of the desired effect, as now Olivia is determined more than ever to testify. Tommy learns all that from his mole, so he sends out Freddie along with a couple of his mooks to shut Olivia's mouth, permanently. They succeed in killing the girl, but Kersey manages to get away, and if you've seen the last four movies in this series, you probably have an idea what he's planning to do.

Though maybe Kersey is slowing down a bit in his dotage, as rather than immediately getting the largest handgun on the market and blasting every wiseguy that looks at him funny, he is only really stirred into action when Tommy comes for Chelsea. Even though he's a suspected crime boss, Tommy is still the girl's father, and as a result, has the best legal claim to the legal guardianship of the girl. So, he takes her away to live with him in his penthouse, though I would say it's hardly the ideal environment for a young girl like Chelsea. In one particularly memorable scene, we see Chelsea in her new room, and hear Tommy next-door, first putting the moves on his trashy girlfriend Maxine, and later beating her when he fails to get an erection. Obviously, Kersey isn't the kind of guy who sits idly by while an innocent child is in danger, so he begins to systematically murder everyone in O'Shae's organization. Kersey sets about this task with his usual flair, starting off by poisoning one of Tommy's goons, Chicki Paconi with a bit of arsenic laced-sugar sprinkled onto his morning canoli. Next up is Freddie Flakes, who gets blown sky-high with a remote control bomb. After that, Tommy O'Shea finds himself in the cross-hairs, though he still has an ace up his sleeve in the form of his spy within the DA's office.

I suspect that opinions will be divided over where Death Wish 5 sits in relation to the rest of the franchise. The professional critics panned it upon release, and currently, Death Wish 5 is sitting pretty with a 0% approval rating on rotten tomatoes, the lowest of any Death Wish film. But then again, the critics hated Death Wish 3 (1985) as well, and that movie is unquestionably the best (though certainly the dumbest as well) of the whole bunch. Death Wish 5 does not live up to its reputation of being an impossibly shitty and stupid movie, and indeed it's downright fun at times watching the absurd action set pieces, like the scene where Kersey interrogates a thug with an industrial-sized saran wrap machine. The gunfights are passable, and you always know what is going on but on the whole, they are nothing special. Unlike earlier entries in the series, Bronson doesn't even attempt to do any stunt-work, which is probably for the best. As a Death Wish film, the action and tone are way too goofy to fit in with the rest of the series comfortably but were it an original action movie I suspect it would be better received.

The villains in the Death Wish series have always been somewhat lacking, sometimes deliberately like the random thugs in the first two movies, and other times as a result of poor writing, like the drug lord with the idiotic plan of antagonizing Kersey as a way of taking over Los Angles' drug trade in Death Wish 4. Manny Frakker, the leader of the street gang The Creeps, in Death Wish 3 (1985), was probably the closest thing the series has to a memorable villain up to this point, and even he comes across as a mostly generic street-gang boss. Tommy O'Shea stands head and shoulders above the rest of his competition, thanks to a wonderfully hammy and occasionally sinister performance by Michael Parks. His erratic behavior extends to the dialogue where he lapses momentarily into comedic personas, like when he interrogates Olivia's black employee and starts talking in an exaggerated Uncle Remus voice straight from a movie Disney would rather we forgot about. When Kersey has him cornered, rather than scowl or plead, Tommy just switches to a goofy voice and exaggerated begs for his life in a way that only increases his menace. Were this a realistic film like Death Wish (1974), he'd be absurd and unwelcome, but over the last two decades the series had made the jump to ridiculous action, and in such a position O'Shea is a delight. The cross-dressing hit-man Freddie Flakes is even more absurd, given the way he rants about his chronic dandruff at every opportunity, and talks constantly about his security system like its “being back in the womb.” These guys are in the same territory as The Night Slasher or Lord Humongous in terms of over-the-top campiness, and I got to admit, I love them for it. The fact that they carry this entry of Death Wish just highlights how much the series has evolved since the gritty first entry. These guys have more in common with Bond villains than they do with simple, cruel thugs of the first two Death Wish movies.