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The Death Wish remake (trailer below) is gonna be big. For one thing, it’s a role Bruce Willis was born to play. Again. Still. For another, the film’s “alt-right” pro-gun vigilante vibe is sure to infuriate the mainstream media — leading to massive free publicity. And ticket sales. After watching this clip (not magazine), I’m left wondering . . .

why wasn’t Lucy Kersey armed when her home was invaded?

Anyway, sight unseen, do you reckon Death Wish is going to hurt or help the pro-gun rights cause? ‘Cause as sure as Paul Kersey’s GLOCK isn’t going to stovepipe, DW’s going to play it both ways (despite this seemingly straightforward trailer). There’ll be an anti-gun/violence message in there somewhere.

While we’re at it, what did you think of the original?

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61 COMMENTS

    • The original Death Wish is awesome. Watched it again last night.

      Remained me of a true story. About 6 months after La Affaire Goetz, a similar situation happened on a NYC subway train. Criminal with a knife approaches a well dressed man, waves knife, demands money, victim reaches into coat, pulls gun, shoots Hood in self defense. Replaces gun, picks up briefcase and gets off at next stop. Late entering passenger screams and police come. None of the dozen people in that car saw or heard anything when interviewed. The police call for shooter to “turn himself in”. Being smarter than Bernie, he does not. Never has, never will, sleeps soundly.

    • And explained why his family was unarmed at the time of the attack he had served in Korea as a conscientious objector and was against violence until his family was murdered.

  1. The original was dark and serious, with the exception of some light touches by the great Vincent Gardenia and the final shot of the movie. This movie (at least based on the trailer, which can be deceiving) looks too self-conscious and jokey, which the original was definitely not. The trailer makes this look like a fairly run of the mill revenge flick. I’ll see it anyway.

  2. Original movie was ok. Book was better (as usual). Once the remake comes out on video, I’ll check out a copy from my public library.

  3. The question is “Will it accurately show Illinois firearms laws?”

    The way Bronson got his revolver in the first movie was technically illegal, since it was given as a gift in a state where he was not a resident.

    Football star turned actor Jim Brown considered Bronson to be a legit tough guy.

    I doubt the remake will be as good as the original, Eli Roth is a hack. It will take all of Bruce Willis’ talent to save the movie from Roth.

  4. I think this will be a popular remake for sure. I don’t think any “messaging” in movies matters much in 2017. I will enjoy lefties flipping their lids over it.

    • The leftists will be pissed because its their voters that’re getting ventilated…. If Democrats would stop raping, robbing, and shooting people; this would be a pretty damn safe country…..

    • ” I don’t think any “messaging” in movies matters much in 2017.”

      I disagree on that. The ‘message’ in that movie is that guns can right a wrong when law enforcement is unwilling or unable to deal with it.

      The gun itself wasn’t evil, it was simply a tool in the toolbox used to fix a ‘problem’…

  5. It looks good, but I’ll wait for a review. I don’t want to waste my money if the trailer is a bait and switch and the movie is loaded with SJW themes. Hollywood is deeply in the red this year so maybe they will cool it on the lefty bullshit.

  6. Why was my first post marked as “spam” and deleted? It was a simple post saying that I would pay to go see the movie. Nothing spam about it. Guess I’m just going to have to stop commenting on TTAG posts.

  7. I just rewatched the original. It was pretty dark and serious. Not sure how the remake will be.

    The fact that Hollyweird keeps remaking movies shows that the “creative class” really aren’t that creative.

    • There have already been four remakes. And none of them quite matched the original, but some had their moments.

      Hardware was interesting, if not quite believable, in DW3:
      Being this is a .475 Wildey, the most powerful handgun in the world, you gotta ask yourself, do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk? That and the belt fed Browning were a bit over the top, but entirely possible for the characters to have. The LAW was a bit too much, however, and Kersey obviously didn’t come by it legally, or even honestly. The bad guy in that movie was the sort of fellow you’d like to shoot center mass with an RPG or LAW, just to see what it would do to him.

  8. It’d be nice if they made a decent Punisher movie but they’ve all been awful and made so frequently that the market is exhausted.

    • Amen!! The first remake was decent, the Dolph Lundgren one was either awesome or terrible depending on who you ask, and the Warzone movie absolutely sucked. I think it’s a conspiracy these crappy reboots only happen to lesser known characters…. Punisher, Daredevil, Elektra, Luke Cage, Jessica Jones, Iron Fist, and the list goes on and on.

      Also if you have any good will towards Iron Fist DO NOT watch Marvel’s Defenders on Netflix basically the whole thing is just him getting his a** kicked by random people until the other 3 bail him out. SPOILER ALERT: Daredevil dies after him and a re animated Elektra have their epic final battle/passionate love scene.

  9. Some original movies should not be remade/rebooted and any attempt is going to bomb.

    Is Death Wish?

    The first one was serious and shocking. Thats what this one will need to do. Shock even the numb society we have now. I don’t know if Willis can pull it off like Bronson did. Kinda doubt it but we’ll see.

  10. Looks like he’s killing white people and helping out black people.
    SJW’s are going to have a hard time marching in their pussy hats against this.

    If I recall correctly Bronson took out mostly whites in the original too. Back when gangs were portrayed as ambiguously gay, rainbow clad roller skaters.

  11. I agree certain movies stand the test of time and shouldn’t be remade. Death Wish is one of them. Actually this is third time. There was a terrible one called Death Sentence with Kevin Bacon that was based off the same book.
    I just hope like hell they don’t remake the Dirty Harry movies

    • Death Sentence is based off a second book by Garfield, named Death Sentence. He wrote it in response to the perception that Death Wish advocated vigilantism.

  12. Original was dark, but it was a great movie. I will pay to go see this one in the theater, which is something I have been doing less often this year. Gonna go see It this weekend, the original book was written by King before he got run over, as all his better books were.

  13. Considering he buys a Glock in Chicago and walks out with it the same day… I’m gonna say it doesn’t truly reflect Chicago’s gun laws. His wife wasn’t armed because they live in Chicago and he wasn’t a gun guy until after that event.

    • I was born in Chicago, and between there and the burbs, lived there for 18 years. I only knew one person who hunted, and none that owned handguns (that I knew of). the burbs on the near north or north side were extremely safe–boringly so. My father was a surgeon who worked Cook County Hospital (now Stoeger Memorial) and the County Jail Medical Facility. Neither he nor any of the other doctors he worked with were ever armed, and in all the years that I can recall, only one got mugged. It may be different now, but back then the unwritten law was that doctors were to be left alone because sooner or later the gang members (or family) were going to end up in the hospital, and the last thing you’d want is the ER doc fingering you as the guy that mugged him. On the other hand, with all the gang bangers roaming the halls, there was (and probably still is) a very large CPD presence 24/7/365.

  14. Honestly, I don’t remember whether I saw the first one, I think I did.

    I need to watch both movies AND read the book.

    There’s a line between revenge fantasy as a moral vehicle and gratuitous violence pandering to the masses. The trailer teaser hints at some constructive message but we’ll have to see whether it ends up being constructive to the Second Amendment or something that labels us as ludicrous goons.

  15. I saw the first Death Wish in a theater in NYC in ’74.

    At that time, NYC was submerged in crime and left defenseless by two feckless mayors, John Lindsay and Abe Beame (the odious David Dinkens would arrive later). With about 150,000 violent crimes per year, 2000 murders and 5000 rapes, NYC was a running sewer and good people were angry, afraid and disarmed.

    Every time Kersey capped a bad guy and then at the end of the movie, the audience applauded and cheered. That’s when I knew that changes were coming. It took Rudy Giuliani to finally start to suppress crime, and I do believe that he helped to save NYC. Without his influence, NYC would be Chiraq.

  16. The scenes in the preview don’t look nearly as realistic as in the original. That was highly realistic street violence, or so I am told.

    Should be fun to see, but doubtful it dethrones the original.

  17. The original had people needing 3-shot kills and there were even some Bronson derpy-dives to cover. The action wasn’t the story, it was just the punctuation.

  18. As to RF’s question “Why wasn’t Mrs. Kersey armed to begin with?” the main answer is that Mr. Kersey was a “bleeding heart liberal.” It wasn’t until Kersey’s family is destroyed and Stuart Margolin’s character Aimes Jainchill, a wealthy Arizona real estate developer, takes Kersey to his firing range club, and gifts Kersey a revolver that it sinks in.

  19. Someone asked me if I thought Bruce Willis was going to keep doing movies. I said “Of course! You know what they say about old habits….”

  20. Going off of this trailer, it appears to follow the plot of the original fairly closely up until he gets a gun. Bronson’s Kersey never finds, or even really hunts for his family’s attackers. He swings from a one-time conscientious objector, bleeding-heart liberal to a vigilante “baiting” violent hoodlums (by doing little more than deliberately traveling alone in high-crime public areas while armed with nothing more than a .32 revolver) and then murdering the ones that survive the initial attack.

    Willis’s Kersey appears to be following the more generic (or classic) revenge storyline, violently working his way up from the bottom to get the people responsible, and doing a lot more shooting. Definitely appears to be less creative, but it does look like a lot of fun.

    • Bruce Willis movies are generally fun. I think he enjoys playing the kick-ass-loner-everyman character. It’s a role that works very well for him, both here and around the world—especially in Asia, just as it similarly worked so well for Clint Eastwood. My guess is that the movie will really be about the role while the narrative will just be popcorn. An interesting philosophical question is whether or not his character becomes a warrior. If he’s “at war” with the bad guys, as Bruce Willis’s characters usually are, then he’s not going to feel much oppressive guilt at the manner or timeliness of their demise.

  21. The original DW is iconic, no doubt, but that doesn’t make it impossible for Willis & Co. to deliver a stand-alone product. Acting, direction, editing, production values, etc., have all improved (in the right hands) over the last 40 years, so the necessary ingredients for a remake to withstand comparisons with an icon are all available. We’ll see.

    I’m already hoping for a sequel.

  22. Alt-Right is an abhorrent organization / affiliation. Calling this alt-right, even in quotes, is doing a great disservice to the film.

  23. I was never comfortable with Death Wish. I love Charles Bronson (Once Upon A Time in the West is one of my favorite movies), but there is a point in the movie where the character transistions from a deperate nervous attempt to bring some justice to his environment, to actually relishing and enjoying the killing. It just doesn’t sit well with me.

    • …having just finsihed this new trailer, I have to say, I get the same creepy vibe. Inserting the humor at the end, and the one-liners about “Jack” doing the killing, it doesn’t sit well with me.

  24. I thought revenge porn was when you released the sex video of your ex doing it on a bus all over the internet, so the whole world can see what a lying dirty skank she is and how she slept with your neighbor Berry… and that motherf*cker still had my weedeater and 11/32 drill bit…

    Not that I know what that’s about.

    • “All of a sudden I want to watch Fifth Element again.”

      Any reason is a good reason to see Milla Jovovich sans clothing.

      Yowser! 🙂

  25. This is one of maybe three movies in the past three years I’ve ever actually want to see really badly. Considering the garbage that’s coming out of Hollywood if it pisses off liberals then it makes me happy. Like every time Trump opens his mouth.

  26. I am a bit sceptical about remake. It can be a decent film on its own but the original was violent, gritty and actually realistic. Which may sound weird but it was the 70s movie, before Star Wars… The remake suggest “fun”…

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