Death Wish Collection
Kino Lorber
Directed by Michael Winner (1-3), J. Lee Thompson (4), Allan A. Goldstein (5)
Starring Charles Bronson, Jeff Goldblum, Laurence Fishburne, Alex Winter, Danny Trejo, Michael Parks
Language English
Purchase your copy HERE from Kino Lorber
by "Doc" Hunter Bush
MovieJawn Staff Writer & Podcast Director, cohost of the Hate Watch/Great Watch Podcast
The Collection: Excellent
Released over the course of 20 years, the five Death Wish films follow Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) and his many doomed loved ones and friends. Beginning in New York with 1974's Death Wish, Kersey's wife and daughter are attacked during a robbery, leaving his wife dead and daughter catatonic. Paul spirals into paranoia and violence, becoming known in the papers as “The Vigilante”. This is the most introspective film, and seems to actually be trying to address the corrupting effect of violence on a person's humanity. At the film's end, Paul has nearly died and is forced to leave town, and has lost a lot of his humanity, but importantly, not his job as an architect (which is perhaps the ultimate "movie job").
As a franchise, it's pretty inconsistent overall. The sequels can't even decide whether they're using Arabic or Roman numerals (I will exclusively be using Arabic numerals for clarity). Their settings bounce back and forth from New York to L.A. with very little explanation, aside from Paul's company having branches in a number of cities, and find Paul regularly romancing a beautiful blonde woman and sometimes taking on the responsibilities of a surrogate dad. These folks almost always meet a horrible fate, which is almost always the inciting incident that brings the Vigilante back and allows him an excuse to go on another vengeance rampage.
There are exceptions to these truisms. Death Wish 5: The Face of Death's love interest is the lovely brunette Lesley-Anne Down, playing a former model and head of a high-fashion empire. Death Wish 2's Geri (played by Jill Ireland, Bronson's real-life partner) manages to escape Paul's romantic orbit with her life, merely realizing that her dude is a maniac and leaving him. In Death Wish 3, the inciting incident is actually Paul arriving at an old Army buddy's apartment to find he has just been murdered by a local gang. Don't worry though, they all meet much the same fate as anyone who crosses Kersey's path while he's in one of these increasingly frequent blood fugues.
The Death Wish films have a very strange relationship to violence. Star Charles Bronson seemed largely to be against the graphic depictions of it in these films, and often clashed with Michael Winner who directed the first three. Winner apparently had a habit of writing in changes to the script to include more instances of violence with an eye on making that violence more brutal. In the first film, there is a sexual assault that is depicted with restraint and discretion towards the audience. The second film however, seems to revel in another such assault, the scene going on for minutes. But at the very least, each of these incidents serves a narrative purpose (as thin a justification as that is) by motivating Kersey's vengeance. In Death Wish 3, there is yet another assault that, while shot with greater discretion than the sequence in Death Wish 2, doesn't even serve any narrative purpose. It takes the franchise's depiction of violence from being merely brutal into actively being cruel.
It's a sour note in a film that should otherwise have been a big, dumb, 1980's action movie power fantasy. The finale of Death Wish 3 is an elaborate shootout between Kersey and other tenants of the besieged apartment block against the local gang, and both sides are armed with military grade weapons! The movie has a Chekov's rocket launcher, for Pete's sake! It should be a big violent fantasy but is ultimately tainted in my eyes by the unnecessary cruelty.
I'm pointing all of this out in case, like I was, you aren't fully familiar with the franchise as a whole, so much as with its cultural footprint. The Death Wish films veer wildly across lines of taste and logic with Kersey at times showing regret and being depicted as a human being, while at other times seeming like a serial killer akin to Michael Myers (but with guns, rocket launchers, and at one point an exploding, radio controlled soccer ball!) It's a mixed bag but there is genuine fun of the "big, dumb" variety to be had at points.
The Packaging: Excellent
When taken as a whole, as one object, the collection is modest, but perfect: the cover is a very unsubtle illustration of Charles Bronson's catcher's mitt face (complimentary) and a hand gun against a stark white background with bold black text reading 'BRONSON' and bold red text reading 'DEATH WISH', and then smaller text blocks listing the titles. It's blunt and direct and no nonsense which fits the vibe of the franchise overall (even if the individual films waver a bit from this pseudo mission statement).
Inside the sleeve are two of the sturdier Blu-ray cases and that's where things get just a little odd. One case holds the Michael Winner Death Wish installments and the cover for that one looks like the kind of bootleg you'd buy off of a blanket on the street in Kersey’s New York: three cropped images of Bronson from the posters, next to the appropriate logo. I don't mind this, like at all, but it strikes me as odd. The other case contains the latter two films, but as far as I can tell just features the artwork for Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, and aside from including both logos, makes no allusion to the final film. That's especially odd, and weirdly discordant in style from the other included disc, but not so much that I would knock this release for it. It just struck me as an odd choice(s).
Both cases feature slim booklets with essays about the appropriate films from film historian Paul Talbot, author of the Bronson’s Loose! series of books, one of which is dedicated exclusively to the Death Wish films. He also provides a commentary track for each film, so if the essays are anything to go by, those should be well researched and highly informative (but in the interest of full transparency, I haven't gotten to any of them yet).
The Audio + Video: Good
This is a situation where the less you notice the transfer the better it inherently is. The only times I actively thought about it was when something was off. There are a few bumps in the road but honestly not many for a five film franchise. Death Wish 2 for instance, has a few moments with a distracting amount of film grain. They are all extremely short, and all when Paul goes to various safe houses to either pick up guns or make a fake I.D. I'm guessing these sections of the original film must have been damaged, since other similarly low-light sequences look great. Beyond those, I never had issues with the look of the films at all.
Sonically, I again largely had no problems. The one huge exception was Death Wish 4: The Crackdown which just has an awful balance. The dialogue varies in base volume from scene to scene, and all the action is dialed up WAY louder, meaning I spent my entire viewing riding the volume button on my remote, and constantly being pulled out of the film because I'm too busy not hearing the first sentence of a conversation, then anticipating that the next story movement might get painfully loud again. Beyond that, I never thought about the mix at all. In some of the other installments, there is some obvious disparity occasionally between bits of dialogue that had obviously been recorded later and weren't perfectly replicating the sound of the scene they had been placed in, but nothing egregious.
Personally, I never mind film grain until it becomes a distraction, by which I mean it looks like the drugs just kicked in and you can see every atom dancing. Similarly, I'm not bothered by older audio not being crystal clear. The audio for the original Death Wish was recorded a half century ago; a little fuzziness or barely audible hiss is to be expected. These things, while maybe not ideal, are certainly understandable and make the film feel more real and human. So-called “perfection” is boring.
Special Features: Good
There aren't really very many special features aside from commentary tracks (seven of them spread across five films) and trailers for other Bronson films (a whopping sixteen films, with a few duplicate titles on multiple discs), but what's here is enjoyable. There are interviews with supporting actors John Herzfeld (a subway mugger in Death Wish) and Kirk Taylor (The Giggler in Death Wish 3), both theatrical and unrated cuts for Death Wish 2, and the alternate ending for Death Wish 3 with optional commentary.
Would I have liked more features talking about the evolution of the franchise, from installment to installment? Sure, but I'm guessing the aforementioned commentary tracks from Paul Talbot will be able to scratch that intellectual itch for me, when I finally dive into them.
- Commentaries on all five Death Wish films from Paul Talbot
- Commentary on Death Wish 2 with film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson
- Commentary on Death Wish 3 with film historians Steve Mitchell and Nathaniel Thompson
- Interview with actor John Hertzfeld (18:24)
- Interview with actor Kirk Taylor (8:27)
- Death Wish radio spots (1:31)
- Death Wish TV spot (1:04)
- Death Wish 3 alternate ending (11:01)
- Trailers:
- Death Wish (1974) (2:21)
- Death Wish 2 (1982) (1:55)
- Death Wish 3 (1985) (1:41)
- Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) (1:35)
- Death Wish 5: The Face of Death (1994) (1:01)
- Violent City (1970) (3:54)
- Cold Sweat (1970) (2:36)
- Chato's Land (1972) (2:10)
- The Valachi Papers (1972) (3:24)
- Mr. Majestyk (1974) (1:34)
- Breakout (1975) (1:34)
- Breakheart Pass (1975) (3:07)
- The White Buffalo (1977) (1:52)
- Caboblanco (1980) (2:50)
- Murphy's Law (1986) (1:31)
- Assassination (1987) (1:58)
In Summary: Buy it on sale
I'm rating the collection as a whole very highly because Kino has done a very thorough job with it, but obviously each individual film's content and quality varies, as mentioned above. If you're a Death Wish fan or Charles Bronson completist looking to acquire nice transfers of the franchise in one handsome package, this is your chance. If you've seen one or two and are curious about the rest, I'd still recommend it, but it really depends on how flexible your enjoyment-o-meter is.
I think the first film is the best one as a film, even if I feel like it misses its own point in the end. Death Wish 2 is the worst overall, with very little showcasing Paul Kersey as anything resembling a human being. Death Wish 3 is fun in an over-the-top way, but does feature that one moment of unnecessary cruelty, which is a bummer. Death Wish 4: The Crackdown feels so much like an anti-drug PSA mixed into a Death Wish movie, which is so odd that it actually becomes enjoyable. Finally, Death Wish 5: The Face of Death embraces a cartoonish quality in both the villains and Paul's methods of dispatching them that it really ends up being entertaining (hot take: if the villains from 5 were in the drug storyline from 4, you'd have the best sequel by a mile). I'd love to know your rankings.
