‘Death Sentence’ falters after solid start

Parts of the movie will bring to mind scenes from ‘Taxi
Driver.’

By ROBERT W. BUTLER

KANSAS CITY STAR

With “Death Sentence,” James Wan, the director who hit the big time with the first “Saw” movie, advances from the merely grotesque to the truly reprehensible.

What’s doubly disturbing is that the morally duplicitous “Death Sentence” on some levels represents superior filmmaking. It stars the reliable Kevin Bacon as a suburban dad whose oldest son becomes the victim of a random killing by an inner-city gang. The film’s opening 15 minutes, which introduces us to the Hume family and explores their grief at the loss of a child, is solid moviemaking.

And then it all goes wrong.

Realizing that his child’s murderer will take a plea bargain and will serve only a few years in prison, businessman Nick Hume (Bacon) refuses to testify and allows the miscreant to go free. He’s planning a more personal form of revenge, one that involves stalking and killing the swaggering punk, who committed the crime as part of a gang initiation ceremony.

But his eye-for-an-eye vendetta backfires when the gang and its leader, Billy (Garrett Hedlund), retaliate. First they attempt to assassinate Nick as he leaves his office. Failing to kill him, they announce they’re targeting his wife (Kelly Preston) and surviving son (Jordan Garrett).

Before it’s all over, innocent blood will be shed and Nick will have sold himself to the Dark Side.

Better at action

Wan proves himself a more than competent action director. Midway through “Death Sentence” there’s a gripping chase through a multilevel parking garage that has been captured in one audacious take. And the film culminates with an extended action sequence in which the combat-inexperienced Nick somewhat improbably invades the gang’s meth-lab hideout bent on cleaning house.

Ian Jeffers’ adaptation of Brian Garfield’s novel borrows from much better movies, most notably Martin Scorsese’s “Taxi Driver.” John Goodman plays a sleazoid dealer in illicit firearms whose loquacious sales spiel closely approximates an almost identical scene in “Taxi Driver,” and when Nick shaves his head in preparation for his suicide mission, we instantly flash back to Robert DeNiro and his sinister Mohawk.

Apparently all this unfolds in a city with the world’s slowest police response time, stupidest detectives and most incompetent legal system. Don’t go to “Death Sentence” expecting anything like real-world logic.

Here’s a movie that clucks its tongue at vigilantism, attempting to claim the high moral ground while delivering an atavistic fantasy guaranteed to cater to an audience’s blood lust.

Really, you can’t have it both ways.