DEATH WISH 2018

Rated:  R

STARS: Bruce Willis, Vincent D'Onofrio, Elisabeth Shue, Camilla Morrone
DIRECTOR: Eli Roth
GENRE: Action-Adventure/Drama

Remakes are seldom as good or have the same pizazz as the original (a notable exception was The Thomas Crown Affair). And if we're going to compare and contrast (which we are) Death Wish 2018 with the original 1974 film starring Charles Bronson, the latter version is a misfire. You can't call it a remake, really, so much as something loosely based on the original. 

Paul Kersey (Bruce Willis) is a Chicago surgeon with a nice life. Beautiful wife and daughter. When three intruders break into his home, his wife is killed and his daughter ends up in a coma. Thus begins the transformation, and the irony, of a man who has dedicated his life to saving lives turning into "The Grim Reaper"--cold-blooded judge, jury, and executioner of the violent street scum that have turned Chicago into the murder capital of the country. 

Charles Bronson had the ability to be debonair and dangerous at the same time, and that's what made him intriguing. Bruce Willis is a blue collar guy all the way, and thus hard to swallow as a surgeon from the get-go. He plays it deadpan pretty much throughout, and without the smirking wise-ass persona we've come to know and love, there's not a lot of charisma there. The producers are counting on name recognition alone to put butts in the seats.

The original Death Wish was pretty shocking. It contained one of the most brutal and graphic rape scenes ever for a major film. Wisely, the new version doesn't go there. Which is not to say it doesn't have a ton of violence and gore--whether it's in the operating room or mowing down the bad guys with an increasingly deadly arsenal of firepower. Bruce's Paul Kersey not only offs the perps, he tortures them as well. Bronson's vigilante had too much class for that. He just did what he had to do...plugged 'em and got the hell out of Dodge. All the way to Tucson, with its  established historical precedent for the kind of frontier justice he was meting out. It was a fitting backdrop. Our contemporary vigilante never makes it out of Chicago, and I guess that might turn anybody into a monster.

The similarity is in the message. Fight fire with fire. The end justifies the means because it's often a long wait for the cops to arrive. Only the timing for Death Wish 2018 couldn't have been worse, as a wave of anti gun sentiment now sweeps across the nation.  Even so, you may catch yourself rooting for Mr. Kersey and his do-it-yourself approach...until you stop and say: what am I thinking? 

That's the times we live in.

Grade:  C 

JILL'S TAKE

I kind of knew what to expect from my co-reviewer (since the original Death Wish was one of his very favorite films) but I didn't expect that I'd like this latest version as much as I did.  Of course Bronson's Paul Kersey as an architect was a lot easier to buy than Willis' surgeon role.  But when payback time began, and Die Hard Brucie got down to the business of killing, he became totally believable. Still, the choice by screenwriter Joe Carnahan to make our main character a surgeon was a tad dicey.  (Can you picture any of the surgeons on "Grey's Anatomy" behaving in such an unsavory manner?)

But I was definitely seat-of-the-pants involved with this thriller. The part of Kersey's somewhat shady brother Frank was beautifully portrayed by Vincent D'Onofrio. (He's one of these actors you've seen on TV and in movies but can't quite place.) 

And in an eerie example of life imitating art, the actress who plays Kersey's wife, Elizabeth Shue, was just in the news recently, pleading for any information leading to the arrest of the person who repeatedly stabbed her 20-year-old nephew on the streets of London.

My only nitpicking comment?  We should all be as quickly healed as Bruce Willis was from all his serious bodily injuries.... 

Be forewarned -- there's a lot of maiminig in this movie.  So if the sight of blood makes you queasy, go see Sherlock Gnomes instead.  

Grade: B +

   

  

ROCK THE KASBAH (2015)

Rated: R

STARS: Bill Murray,  Bruce Willis,  Kate Hudson, 
Zooey Deschanel,  Leem Lubany
DIRECTOR: Barry Levinson
GENRE: Comedy-Drama


How much you like Bill Murray--meaning the vintage SNL Bill Murray--will determine whether you get a kick out of Rock The Kasbah, or sit there somewhat embarrassed for everyone involved in the endeavor. And there are a lot of big names involved. 

Rock The Kasbah follows has-been music promoter Richie Lanz (Bill Murray) on a USO tour to Afghanistan, with lounge singer Ronnie (Zooey Deschanel),  presumably his last client who still believes in him. They're counting on an in and out, take the money and run one night stand deal. But Ronnie despises the place from the get-go, whining and making bratty faces (but alluring faces nonetheless), and climbing the walls to get out of there. So it's no surprise when she skips out on Richie, heading for Dubai--leaving him high and dry-- sans money or a passport. I say no surprise in terms of the plot, but it was a shock to me as to why they pulled Zooey Deschanel--whom I like as much as Bill Murray, and if you consider appearances, a whole lot more--out of the movie early on and never brought her back!  I CONSIDER THAT TO BE THE MAJOR FLAW OF THIS FILM. And that's why I'm giving you a heads up so it can factor into your decision as to whether you want to spend your hard earned coin on a movie that makes such questionable choices. (There is Kate Hudson, though, as an affable hooker, which helps to ease the Zooey withdrawal. ) 

So now the plot veers in another direction, with Murray and Bruce Willis-- typecast as a menacing mercenary--playing off of each other. Then Richie overhears a young Pashtun girl named Salima (Leem Lubany), who sings just as sweetly as Shakira (and in fact looks like Shakira with dark hair), and the dollar signs spring up in his eyes. From this point, the movie is a poor man's Slumdog Millionaire, with Richie managing the girl through Afghan Star---the local version of American Idol.  But it will be a bumpy ride, as "uppity" women in this part of the world are frowned upon. In fact, they are often murdered. So after a sluggish start, things pick up in the second half, as momentum--and resistance--to Salima following her dream of singing stardom kicks into high gear. 

There is a lot of goofiness is this movie, thanks to Bill Murray being Bill Murray. That aside, Rock The Kasbah reminds us all too clearly of the plight of middle eastern women, who are little more than chattel to their misogynistic menfolk, and offers that little glimmer of hope that one day this part of the world may yet emerge from the dark ages. 

Grade:  C +

JILL'S TAKE

Ever watch a movie you know you shouldn't like but you keep watching it anyway? Rock the Kasbah was, for me, a good example of that. Not being a Bill Murray fan (except forGroundhog Day and Hyde Park On Hudson), I was prepared to suffer through this movie, eager for the end credits to start rolling. But I got hooked in spite of myself. Silly as the premise was, the message beneath that silliness was touching. I even found myself tearing up at the end, glad that at least one middle eastern woman wasn't stoned for wanting to sing. And sing she did. Beautifully.

Kudos for a musical score by Marcelo Zarvos that really 'rocked.'

I could carp about Bruce Willis playing two distinctly different characters which I still can't figure out. Or certain scenes – Bill Murray doing his happy dance around a campfire of stone-faced tribesmen--dragging on too long. But when I read at the end of the film that it was based on a real event, naming the real woman who won the singing contest, the first Afghan woman ever to do so, I forgave all the movie's imperfections and left the theater feeling hopeful.

Grade:  B

SURROGATES (PG-13)

We're getting lazier all the time--relying on technology to do things for us that we used to do for ourselves. (I really think it was those veggie slice and dice devices you'd see on the late night infomercials that started the whole thing.) Surrogates takes this growing trend and runs with it--envisioning a world where people lay back on their dead asses and live vicariously through their surrogates: humanoid robots connected to a computer system, controlled by the operator's thoughts, and doing things the lard-butts wouldn't risk themselves in the real world. The operators' brains ostensibly experience everything the surrogates are doing, as if they themselves were out there drinking, dancing, and having wild, anonymous sex with good looking counterparts--whiling their lives away in a virtual reality twilight zone.

Naturally, there's a backlash to all of this: the humans who still want to engage life first hand and are having none of this robot crap. They live in segregated areas with revolution on their minds. When Dr. Lionel Canter, (James Cromwell) the man who created the surrogate phenomenon, is targeted and his son is accidently killed instead, it sends FBI agent Greer (Bruce Willis) and his partner Jennifer Peters, (Radha Mitchell) on a quest--via their own robot couterparts--to find the weapon that can fry the brains of operators when their surrogates are "assassinated."

Surrogates had the potential to be a more adult, cerebral kind of film if not for the obligatory smash-em-up car crashes and related mayhem--the kind of thing that's become such standard fare in movies that have nothing to say, that it's become boring and annoying. But Surrogates DOES have something to say. It's making a statement about the nature of addiction--specifically our growing addiction to the various ways in which we live--or try to live--vicariously: through the internet, (often lurking anonymously behind our on-line personalities--engaging others who may be doing the same) spectator sports, movies and television, and computer fantasy games, to name a few. All of which have their legions of addicted followers. And because people fall so easily into the trap of "acceptable" addiction--blathering away on their cell phones and texting while driving--it's not hard to imagine a world of the not too distant future where surrogates actually exist.

It's a film that gives one pause, and it's why I decided to post my real life photo here, to give Timmy's Noodle more of a human face--a photo which, no doubt, has been used by at least a few disgruntled females to throw darts at...but that's another story.

GRADE:   B