The 2018 Death Wish remake stars Bruce Willis as Paul Kersey, a Chicagoan suburban-dad-turned gun-toting vigilante out to kill thugs with tattoos and dirty teeth. The 1974 Death Wish original stars Charles Bronson as Paul Kersey, a New Yorker dad-turned gun-toting vigilante out to kill psychopathic street muggers. These ordinary men are driven to such extreme actions after a violent assault on their family.

But which film wins out? The stodgily directed and ugly original or the blandly watchable remake? Read on to find out. 

Death Wish (1974) doesn't craft challenging art out of a primitive vigilante fantasy like its contemporary Taxi Driver does. Quite the opposite. It gleefully propagates the vigilante fantasy. It's as if it were manufactured to safely satiate a societal blood lust.

But to get us on board with the Good Guy with a Gun protagonist, Death Wish posits its New York City setting as an apocalyptic urban hellscape in need of a fellow unafraid to bloody his hands. This actually hews close to the grim reality of New York City at that time. Ravaged by a tanking economy and rampant crime, the city was peppered with abandoned, scuzzy buildings, like haunted monuments of a failed civilisation. So dire was the city that in 1975, President Gerald Ford refused to halt New York’s tumble into bankruptcy. The front page of the Daily News bared the infamous headline: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD”.

Death Wish captured this hopeless and dreary atmosphere quite faithfully. Cinematographer Arthur Ornitz textured this 70s New York with vast swaths of malevolent shadows and layers of grain and grit. You can almost smell the fetid grime and decay.

Leading man Charles Bronson, with his meaty facial features, thin disciplined moustache and beady, steely eyes, was the right kind of rough-and-tumble everyman hero, one who could make you feel safe taking the subway after dark. Bronson’s deliberately limited personality allowed an audience -- an audience fed up with being mired in shit and fear -- to easily project themselves onto this personification of standing your ground. It’s easy to root for Bronson, even though he’s unquestionably a lunatic serial killer who has no qualms about shooting people in the back.   

Eventually the cops wise up to his vigilante act. Bronson isn't arrested, but he is banished from New York. Death Wish, though it aligns unambiguously with his heinous methods, is at least cognisant of Bronson’s outlaw status, cognisant of the fact that he has no place in a civilised society. However the final scene of a smiling Bronson playfully pointing a finger gun at some hoodlums assures a bloodthirsty audience that he’ll continue to gun down the freaks and the undesirables, wherever they may crawl. He splendidly embodies a shameful if understandable impulse. It’s no wonder audiences at that grubby stuff up with a spoon.

Interestingly enough the book on which the movie is based takes on an obviously critical view of wholesale slaughter. The template is the same – bleeding heart liberal turns into a vengeful fascist after an attack on his family – but the novel’s protagonist, Paul Benjamin, more thoroughly and painfully embodies America’s moral quandary. He’s a weak and troubled man, torn between paranoia and guilt. Paul Benjamin’s final choice to become judge, jury, and executioner isn’t his salvation but his damnation. Author Brian Garfield details this explicitly: “The body rotted, the mind deteriorated; only the demons of subconscious fantasies thrived”. Nightmarish stuff.

Naturally, Garfield was aghast at Death Wish’s masturbatory fantasy. So appalled and frustrated that the movie perverted his critiques of violence into a quasi-endorsement of violence, Garfield wrote a follow-up novel, Death Sentence. Hilariously, Death Sentence was even more explicit in its condemnation of vigilantism.

Director Eli Roth's 2018 Death Wish is amoral. Not immoral, which is what the original is. Because for as ugly and horrifying as that film is, it at least has an ethos, right-wing and extreme though it may be. No, 2018 Death Wish is without a path to tread. Its politics can be summed up as: “Both sides…both sides”. The rise of mass shootings in America means that for a Death Wish movie to be commercially viable in 2018, it would have to be palatable. It would have to have its idealogical edges sanded off.

So, is this new Death Wish a satirical critique of gun-nut culture? The ham-fisted comedic ease with which Bruce Willis’ Paul Kersey purchases weapons of mass slaughter in a sporting goods store points to this being so. And yet we’re meant to un-ironically cheer for this ageing man, who has no moral or societal authority, to become the ultimate badass.

Further muddying the waters is the cheap veneer of thoughtfulness in the form of Roth using real-life morning show host Sway Calloway to function as a Greek Chorus of sorts. He provides commentary like: “Yo, do we really want this dude shooting people on the streets?”. There are no answers. Nor are there even really questions. Just faux-realistic babbling half-heartedly pushed to make you think Death Wish doesn't wholly celebrate wholesale slaughter. It's sleazy misdirection.  

Death Wish does hint at something intellectually interesting. One key differentiation from the original is that this Paul Kersey is a surgeon. A split-screen montage portrays surgeon Paul Kersey surgically removing bullets from victims and vigilante Paul Kersey prepping his weaponry. There’s a serious suggestion here of the sad futility of his vengeance, of a limbo he can't escape. But whatever serious point Roth was trying to make during this montage is drowned out by his juvenile choice to blare AC/DC’s “Back in Black”. Absolutely nobody will be pondering the larger implications of violence during such a fun song. Moreover, a therapist unwittingly encourages Kersey, "You look great. Whatever you're doing, keep it up." A grinning, psychopathic Bruce Willis chuckles and replies, "Thanks, I will". This is played strictly for laughs and it's dumb and hideous beyond belief. Who is this meant for? 

Feeble attempts at thematic cohesion aside, the remake hews far closer to the realm of fantasy than the original ever did. The antiseptic aesthetics are more reminiscent of an episode of CSI than the artistry of the original, and the droning Hans Zimmer-esque score and Chicago setting deliberately echoes Nolan’s The Dark Knight. Paul Kersey, with only his simple hoodie to cover his identity, is branded by the media with a comic-book like moniker, “The Grim Reaper”. Willis deploys clever one-liners with every kill, unlike the taciturn Bronson. In the early to mid 70s, realism was en vogue. But in 2018 the comic book superhero reigns supreme. It's not enough for Paul Kersey to be a meaner and quicker than any street rat -- he's got to be a hyper-competent and super cool superhero.  

The superhero associations are also weak tea attempts to justify its polar-opposite-of-the-original ending. This time, Kersey gets to successfully exact revenge against the attackers when they invade his home again. And Dean Norris’ tough guy cop all but knights Kersey as a Man again, reaffirming his place in society rather than banishing him: “You did what any man would have done. You protected your family”. At this nauseating point you can only hope that Roth's NRA check cleared. The cherry on-top is the cop proceeding to heartily chowing down a pizza slice. This is a rare instance of self-awareness; Roth is savvy enough to know you aren’t here to eat your vegetables. And yet nobody ate this sugary slop up, judging by the disappointing box office returns. With crime on an overall downward trend, could it be that the societal bloodlust isn’t as frenzied? 

The likelier answer is that there’s no audience for this kind of story in 2018 unless there’s a new wrinkle added to it in order to bestow a contemporary resonance. For example, the Marvel Netflix show The Punisher, based on the comic cut from the same cloth as Death Wish, shifted Frank Castle’s army-of-one vigilante fury away from street hoodlums and funnelled it toward the Military-industrial complex that chewed him up and spat him out. Same mad man, new politically charged targets. With the rise of Black Lives Matter, with endless videos of cops disproportionately targeting black men in America, Paul Kersey could theoretically be reborn as a young black man vigilante who targets racist cops. 

But that wouldn’t be the safe choice. That would likely piss everybody off. Better to cast a well-known action hero and align him closer to Batman or something and be forgotten about entirely by next week.

So, which one wins out? The original or the remake? If you’re here just for the badass with a heart of granite to take out punks, the remake all the way. Eli Roth, mainly recognised for his horror movies, has a gross preoccupation with spilling blood and guts, with bringing the pain, and this crystalises the underlying nastiness of the whole dreadful thing quite beautifully. Hell, the action in the 70s original certainly doesn't hold up. But if you’re looking for a cohesive and atmospheric film with an iconic performance, not to mention a fascinatingly ugly time-capsule of another time and place, the original Death Wish is the way to go. 

Winner: Death Wish (1974)       

That's it for our first instalment of OG v Remake. Disagree with our choice here? Which films would you like us to dissect and pit against one another for the next one?  Comment and let us know!