The biggest issue with this chapter is it’s sloppy as
fuck. It ranges from small things like
the coke having a tan color making you think it’s heroin to larger head scratchers
like the finale strangely taking place in a roller rink and then they abandon
that idea mid scene to finish the fight outside in front of a high-rise office
building.
But what really gets to me is there’s an absurdly annoying
amount of wasted time. Like the first
twenty minutes of the movie that deals with the loss of a loved one essentially
has nothing to do with the playing-drug-gangs-against-each-other plot we
eventually settle on. But also Kersey
goes around bugging the bad guys’ phones and it takes forever for him to get
any useful info out of it. Plus he ends
up killing one fella immediately after placing the bug rendering half the scene
immaterial. And his reporter girlfriend
starts to do research on a piece about drugs but there’s no payoff. We never come back to it after two
scenes. And on and on.
Apparently there were daily rewrites of the script and it
shows. The whole thing is pretty
incoherent and feels the least like a Death Wish entry. With Kersey being recruited and bankrolled to
destroy organized crime it’s basically a cop movie except these guys aren’t
cops.
That isn’t to say they don’t cram in the staples of the
series. Corrupt cops make an appearance,
there’s an attempted rape scene, Kersey blows a guy up with a grenade launcher (I’m
hoping this one in particular carries over into Part 5) and Danny Trejo
(Desperado) plays a bad guy in one of his first roles. You know I gotta hand it to them, for being a
bullshit installment they sure hit the main points.
Overall this is pretty forgettable. If anything it starts to make you feel sorta
bad for Paul Kersey because the man attracts misery at every turn. Whoever comes in contact with him gets their existence
shattered. Does he think the events of
his life are simply a long run of bad luck or is he screaming on the inside in
agony? How much goddamn calamity can one
person take?
Definitely the worst sequel yet.
No comments:
Post a Comment