The logic behind Death Sentence is pairing a recognizable actor with some good old-fashioned ass-kicking. Enter Kevin Bacon, and a bevy of traditionally successful action-flick conventions: a convincing motive, some nameless people to be killed and perhaps a few cool cars.
The result: a classic example of the conclusion “valid but false.”
The movie starts with home video snippets of a happy family, with the passage of time indicated by the growth and styles of Kevin Bacon’s hair (much as I date my own life). The first half hour or so is devoted to Nick Hume (Bacon) and his perfect children. And then one of his kids (Stuart Lafferty)—the one he likes better—is killed, setting off the bloody and gratuitous plot.
Needless to say, character development is severely limited. The boy killed “liked hockey.” The one left, Lucas (Jordan Garrett) is “vulnerable.” Nick is a crappy father who picks favorites, and he picked the wrong one—Lucas is cooler. The wife has no characteristics whatsoever, except an awesome propensity to forgive her idiot of a husband when he brings a gang war into their house, which eventually leads to her death. Apparently, there’s no place for women in this movie.
Once Favorite Hockey Boy is killed, Nick decides that the only logical thing to do, what with the corrupt legal system and the imminent threat of all those unruly tattoos and cars spilling into his happy suburban life, is to kill the boy who killed his boy. A war ensues against the whitest gang since Grease. John Goodman is the capo (I was just waiting for him to shout “It’s a league game, Smokey!” when he was brandishing a gun).
More killing ensues, and the stern policewoman says things like, “The officer out there is protecting you from yourself,” until finally we get the payoff to this lengthy Charlton Heston set piece. Nick stumbles out of the hospital, all bandages and blood, shaves his head (thus recontextualizing 2007 for me), and starts tearing shit up. But this fun ten minutes isn’t worth the ninety minutes leading up to it. Despite the absurdity of the premise, the characters, the setup, the story, the casting, and the sheer awfulness of the whole thing, the movie manages to be boring.
For instance, when the bad guys come to Nick’s workplace, and there’s a long run through a garage with punching and stuff, it’s somehow thuddingly tedious, even when a car flies off the roof. At least in The Matrix, when the characters are running around committing serious violence while wearing suits, one discerns a commentary on the buttoned down society we live in, and the terror and cruelty inherent in it. This film is nothing like that. Any clever ideas, any humor or insight is left to rot in favor of red lighting and curlicue tattoos. And so I propose to our criminal justice system a new form of punishmentshy;—“The Death Sentence Sentence,” an endless loop of the star of Footloose shooting some pasty white kid with a rifle bought from Roseanne’s husband. I expect rates of recidivism would fall dramatically.
