Popular reviews

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  Review by davidehrlich ★★½ 44

  2018 is turning out to be a truly inclusive year for on-screen representation. “Black Panther” invited African-American audiences to see themselves in a massive superhero movie that wasn’t about their own oppression, “A Fantastic Woman” gave transgender women the chance to see themselves in an acclaimed film that wasn’t terribly retrograde, and now Eli Roth’s dangerously enjoyable “Death Wish” gives right-wing lunatics the opportunity to see themselves in a fascist fairy tale that wasn’t directed by Dinesh D’Souza. To each their own cinema.

  Set in an alternate-reality Chicago where the police are so overwhelmed by inner-city crime that they can’t spare the resources required to solve the murder of an affluent white woman, this contemporary riff on Charles Bronson’s vigilante…

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  Review by Todd Gaines ★★★½ 18

  Bruce Willis awakens from his acting coma and actually acts as Dr Paul Kersey in Eli Roth’s remake of the Michael Winner / Charles Bronson revenge classic.

  Chicago has a high as a kite murder rate, and that’s not fake news. Chicago is the perfect setting for the retelling of Death Wish.

  Death Wish is the most un-Eli Roth film I’ve seen. You couldn’t tell he directed, and in my opinion, that’s a cool thing. Some might throw the term “torture porn” for some of the kill scenes. But, I would argue, calling Death Wish torture porn, is like calling American Hustle a T & A flick because it shows Amy Adams’ side boob. The home invasion scene could’ve been a…

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  Review by matt lynch ★★ 5

  Intermittently amusing thanks to Roth's penchant for gore gags, but otherwise this is pretty bland even for a piece of shameless tin-eared violence porn. Michael Winner would never have made anything so tame.

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  Review by pd187 ★★★★ 6

  "that sounds like a good scream" "that sounded like a very good scream"

  all of roth's movies make explicit the stuff thats unspoken in normal movies, like de palma* crankin up (& to) the shit implied by old hollywood (pre-frenzy) hitchcock, except brian depalma never used splitscreen to put up worldstar memes of his main character cold-blooded murdering a car thief ("when somebody spoils game of thrones"). its disgusting to imagine the world's worst assholes swallowing this as a news report from trump's chiraq (stand-in for oprah & obama & everything black they hate) but all of roth's politics & signifiers fly scattershot to avoid revealing his real target - studio notes aside, death wish is a mess because hes not indulging, hes…

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  Review by nathaxnne <3 [hiatus] ★★★★½ 36

  What's maddening to think about while watching Death Wish (2018) is someone like Philando Castile who owned a legally registered firearm and who followed police instructions and who was shot to death by the cops in his own vehicle while breaking no law. I thought about that a lot. This movie is a fantasy of white privilege, of a legitimate use of extralegal assassination by someone just and wise enough to wield it properly. That it is not only some white guy, but the ur-white-guy in Bruce Willis, who is reprising a role of Grumpy White Dude Exasperated With The Slowness Of Authority Engages In A DIY Project, the plaint of every libertarian white dude everywhere who is like 'i…

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½

  Eli Roth, half vile prankster, half dead-on sociologist. Even the fact that this is uncertain about how far it is willing to go on pulp/responsible scale will help it age as well as the Hostel movies did.

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  Review by Ian West ★★★½ 10

  Didn’t know how I felt about this at the half hour mark... and then the stiff serious nature flipped when the gun commercial happened that included the firearm furniture thing and I realized I was 100% in an Eli Roth movie. Way more layered than many (but not all) of these one star reviews led me to believe, when all else fails trust pd187

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★ 6

  I've been thinking a lot lately about Bruce Willis. since the announcement that he's retired from acting due to aphasia, I've been thinking about the last few years of his career. the exploitation that he's experienced has really depressed me since first reading about it months ago, and I often get angry about it when thinking about how it might have damaged his health and permanently impacted his legacy for generations of audiences. but in the last couple weeks, I've been thinking about the couple of late-period performances of his that have sunk under my skin and stayed there for years and years. how much of what resonated with me about Willis' work in his last several great movies were…

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  Review by Logan Kenny ★★★★ 4

  depicts the egotistical rage beneath the passive surface of the ideal white american man, and the decay and rebirth of civility through the barrel of a gun better than basically any american film of late. the sentimentalist edge and sadistic almost gleeful violence (the smile on willis’ face when he sees a video of him executing a man is horrifying and fitting to what the film’s doing) make it feel quintessentially american, where no matter the actions of willis, he will smile to the apathetic police with their donuts and go back to the ideal existence he experienced before the bullets started flying, only now he is the shooter and that thirst for good old fashioned americana style violence never fades. no wonder this pissed people off. 
  “A white man goes around shooting black people and you’re ok with it?”
  “They were drug dealers”

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  Review by Buddy O ★★ 3

  This film was the epitome of shitty pacing and terrible acting but Eli Roths use of violence, gore and humour will always leave me wanting to watch his next film.

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  Review by calamityhey ★★★½ 20

  A stunning subversion of the original source material ala Starship Troopers, Eli Roth takes the faux-cathartic, objectionable murder reveries of the Bronson original and pares away the tough guy grime. The results are pretty horrifying and perhaps even better than my star rating suggests (though there's some dicey plotting here) - fuckhead dad as wanna be superhero, the forgotten white man attempting to assert himself on the world through clumsy, arbitrary violence.

  In this sense its an apt continuation of what Roth was working on in Knock Knock (and a move away from the bad, confused politics of Green Inerno), a subtle depiction of upper middle class male dissatisfaction toxifying. Roth is clever enough to not play up Willis' (similarly…

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  Review by BeHaind ★½ 4

  Wenn Selbstjustiz und militante Selbstbefriedigung sich die Klinke in die Hand geben, dann hat mal wieder irgendwer die ollen Rachekamellen aus den 70ern exhumiert und versucht sich in der Ära Trump an unverhohlen plumper Tötungspropaganda für empörte Wutbürger. 
  Das Ergebnis: Death Wish. Oder auch: Eine selten dümmliche Gewalt- und Rachepornographie, die eigentlich im Grunde gar nichts kann - wäre gerne Grindhouse (wie der letzte, extra in diesem Stil produzierte Trailer suggeriert), ist aber doch nur zahn- und glanzloses Geballer auf Vorabendserienniveau.

  Ist erst seltsam blutarm und spaßbefreit, fährt dann plötzlich Folterexzesse und Oneliner auf.
  Versucht der Hauptfigur erst in quälend kitschigen Familienszenen emotionalen Unterboden einzuhämmern, wirft dann aber erst jede Moral, dann alle Glaubwürdigkeit über den Haufen.
  Und setzt mit Bruce…