Death Wish 4: The Crackdown

Ok, so we’re back in LA (again) and Paul Kersey (Charlie Bronson (The Great Escape)) has settled into his architect job.  He isn’t going out at night anymore to do his vigilante thang.  Tragedy strikes once more though when the teenage daughter of the woman he’s dating overdoses on coke which puts him on a path to find and kill the dealer.  After that we completely switch gears to a Yojimbo type plot with some mysterious rich dude hiring Kersey to take out the two largest drug gangs in town.  Of course he accepts to feed his passion for destroying human life.

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.

And I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the sweet Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 cardboard cutout we’re treated to when Kersey pays a bad guy a visit in a video store.  Cannon made that picture as well as the first three Death Wish sequels.  So nice to see that masterpiece getting some love mugging for the camera in the background.

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.