Death Wish 2 (

1982

)

During the 8-year period between the first two installments of the Death Wish franchise American attitudes towards crime changed drastically. Despite steadily rising crime levels in the mid-1970s, it was still possible for many bleeding hearts to hold out hope that new rounds of social reforms would produce a better, more just society. By 1982, with crime having risen continuously since the early 1960s, the opinion of the demos had decidedly shifted from “let’s talk this problem out” to “kill the bastards!” Vigilante murderers were no longer the controversial, morally ambiguous figures of Dirty Harry (1971) and Taxi Driver (1976) but full-blown heroic psychopaths like The Exterminator (1980). It wasn’t just movies either where we could see this phenomenon when The Punisher first appeared in Marvel Comics in 1974, he was meant as an antagonist for Spiderman. A complicated villain, with sympathetic motivations but a villain nonetheless, and one that the hero would have to stop. By 1986 though, The Punisher made a heel-turn-face despite standing perfectly still and emerged as a hero, albeit one of the most dubious ones in comics.

The average American was no longer willing to accept a morally ambiguous vigilante killer. They were sick of the perceived softness on crime, sick of being made to feel weak and helpless by criminals, and sick of anything with the taint of moral ambiguity. They wanted a god-damn hero. In such an atmosphere, the Paul Kersey of Death Wish (1974) was hopelessly out of place. For starters, the way he waged his one-man war on crime was engineered to make him as unsympathetic as possible. Shooting up random muggers while making no effort whatsoever to track down the specific criminals that destroyed his family, could be viewed as justifiable or even beneficial for the larger society but it was too inhuman for audiences to comprehend. Killing the man that raped your daughter is a goal any father can understand, killing men that might rape somebody else’s daughter, while effectively the same, requires a certain inhuman logic. Moreover, the original Death Wish’s depiction of society was far too rosy an image to justify the callous brutality of the vigilante killer. In order for the audience to sympathize with the killer’s actions, the existing legal systems have to have failed in some way. Either through corruption (The Exterminator (1980)), incompetence (Dirty Harry (1971)) or the gradual plague of madness sweeping over the earth (Mad Max (1979)). The NYPD of Death Wish (1974) was not only highly capable, they even managed to track down Kersey based on little more than a couple of hunches and some lucky breaks. Hell, the only reason that the murder of Kersey’s wife and the rape of his daughter go unsolved is because Kersey’s son-in-law won’t let his wife testify for fear that the interrogation will shatter her fragile psyche. Obviously, all this would have to change for the sequel.

We pick up Paul Kersey, not gunning down scumbags in Chicago where we left him at the end of Death Wish (1974) but living comfortably in Los Angeles, dating a local radio personality Geri Nichols, and generally living a life far more comfortably and normally than you would have expected. He’s still the same old Paul though, and when he’s mugged while out on with his daughter (who he’s moved to an asylum in California) and Geri, he reacts exactly how you’d expect him to: by chasing one of the punks down and escalating the situation. The gang (which, as was normal in the 1980s crime movies, is as diverse as the Burger King Kids Club), refuses to take this indignity lying down, so they track down Paul’s house and spring a trap. They start by breaking in and repeatedly raping Paul’s housekeeper Rosaria, while they wait for Paul to come home. When Paul arrives with his daughter, Carol, the gang ambushes them, bludgeons Paul and makes off with the girl. In case you hadn’t gotten the message that these were supposed to be the bad guys, the thugs repeatedly rape Carol, until she breaks free and kills herself by jumping out the nearest window onto a wrought iron fence. It’s startling how pervasive and vile the sexual violence in this movies is, especially in our current age where every off-camera rape scene in Game of Thrones draws a chorus of angry criticism. In the decade since The Last House on the Left (1972), all manner of wanton sexual violence had seeped its way deeper and deeper into the cultural mainstream.

Paul refuses to cooperate with the police, because, as he puts it, the NYPD got a good description of the muggers that killed his wife and they never found them. We know that isn’t true, because we’ve seen the first movie, and we saw that the only reason the cops didn’t track down these scumbags was because they couldn’t interview Carol. It could be a continuity error, or it could just be Paul lying because he’d much rather hunt down the criminals himself than let the police have all the fun. Indeed, before long Paul is back up to his old tricks again, stashing a gun and a change of clothes in some $50.00 a month flophouse while he prowls the mean streets looking for familiar faces. He doesn't have to wait long before stumbling on a few of the criminals and tracking them to an abandoned house for a drug deal. Kersey executes one of the thugs he has a vendetta against and tells the drug dealers to get lost before turning his attention to the remaining thug. He notices the thug's cross and asks “You believe in Jesus?” The thug replies “Yes, I do.” “Well, you're gonna meet him.” It's a magnificent scene, that hits all the right notes for proper exploitation. However, it doesn't really fit with the rest of the film. Death Wish (1974) had more in common with the old Westerns than blood-soaked morality plays like Bad Lieutenant (1992). In this scene, Death Wish 2 seems to be reaching for a religious subtext with this scene that it just doesn't have. Forgiveness and turning the other cheek is not just the opposite of what Paul does, its never even considered as an option.

The LAPD is not particularly worried when a couple of low-life scumbags are gunned down in an abandoned house and are prepared to write it off as a drug deal gone bad. However, when Kersey kills the next set of thugs, this time saving a woman from being raped in the process the police have to take notice. They quickly realize that they have a vigilante on their hands, and those that the vigilante helped are less than willing to give them a good description of the guy. According to them, he's either a short man with a red beard or a hulking black guy. Word of the vigilante spreads back to New York, where Frank Ochoa, the detective who ran Kersey out of town at the end of the original Death Wish (1974), puts the pieces together. Naturally, the NYPD is worried about the scandal that Kersey's arrest in Los Angels could cause, so they dispatch Ochoa to LA, ostensibly to aid in the investigation, but really to track down Kersey and get him to stop. But Kersey is one stubborn bastard, and it will take a lot more than two major metropolitan police departments to get him to stop his murderous crusade.

Death Wish 2's aspiration is less grandiose than its predecessor. It does not seek to tell the story of a man driven mad by loss and lashing out with random vigilante violence. It instead seeks to tell a much more straightforward tale of crime and revenge. Consequently, Kersey has been promoted from murderous psychopath to sympathetic anti-hero. Indeed, the tone shift was so jarring that Brian Garfield, the author of the novel Death Wish (1974) was based on, commented on the movie that “They'd made a hero out of him [Paul Kersey]... I thought I'd shown that he'd become a very sick man.” His comments show that authors are by no means guaranteed to appreciate the appeal of their creations. People didn't like Death Wish (1974) because it was a morally complicated story of madness and crime, people liked it because they were so sick of being scared of criminals that they had begun to fantasize about blowing them away. Death Wish 2 strips away the contradictions and complexity of the original, leaving behind a lean, mean, exploitation framework. It's less interesting than the original sure, but more viscerally satisfying and arguably more successful in its aims.

Once again, the lead actor is something of a liability. In Death Wish (1974) it as because no one was willing to believe that Charles Bronson was a lily-livered pacifist. Here, it has more to do with the fact that Bronson was in his sixties, and with his always weathered visage he had no chance of passing as a spry young man. Sure, he can still talk tough, and point his gun menacingly, but when the role calls for anything more athletic than that he is a liability. In one scene he executes a role across a rooftop, and he looks positively ridiculous. The hand-to-hand fights that crop up occasionally during the film are also spectacularly awkward. This should have been an easy fix for the filmmakers, just have Kersey deal with his battles with a gun and frequent ducks under cover. Why they insist on demanding a performance from Bronson that he just isn't fit to deliver is beyond me. This was the early 80s if they wanted a spry young action star they could have easily cast Stallone!

The city of Los Angeles is a fully fledged character here, and tellingly after my initial annoyance that the film was not set in Chicago subsided, I had to concede that Los Angeles really was the only place to tell this story. This is a much darker story than the original Death Wish (1974), which was only about one man’s collapse into madness and depravity. Death Wish 2, by contrast, is about the collapse of society around the individual al la Mad Max (1979), and the way in which individuals try to stay sane in a world gone mad. Los Angles in the 1980s, whatever virtues it may have had, was an anarchic mess. A place where hundreds of cultures and dozens of religions collided, with the pervasive poverty and filth giving these disparate groups every reason to escalate their grievances to a violent confrontation. The constant chants of revivalist churches and Hare Krishnas are only occasionally silenced by mournful wails and desperate cries for help. The large open spaces, as opposed to New York's cramped corridors, do little to alleviate the tensions. Indeed, the streets here are far meaner than the ones depicted in Death Wish (1974), if only because the filmmakers are more willing here to rely on guerrilla film-making techniques to get some authentic grit and grime on camera.