Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
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Actor: Charles Bronson, George Dickerson, John P. Ryan, Kay Lenz, Perry LopezBrand: BRONSON,CHARLES
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Color, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 99 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-02-03
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
DVD Reviews of Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
DVD Review: I was making a sandwich
Summary: 3 Stars
The flick gets off to a reasonably promising start with a young woman trying to start her car in a dark underground parking garage, while three men spookily appear one by one and try to break into the vehicle as she screams for help - which soon arrives in the form of BRONSON, blowing away the thugs like nobody's business. But as he looks down at the last one he sees...his own face! Cut to Chuck waking up in bed all sweaty. Why the dream? It has nothing to do with the rest of the film and bespeaks some lazy filmmaking and the need to fill out 100 minutes or so of screentime. Oh well, it's a good start anyway. Now the real story begins: it's a couple of years after the events in Death Wish 3 I guess, and ever-more-aged and weary-looking Paul Kersey (Bronson) is back in LA, the scene of Death Wish 2. I guess after blowing up most of Brooklyn in part 3 he decided to lay low. He's got a new girl - somehow despite an almost complete lack of charm and a face that defines "weathered", ol' Paul always manages to end up with someone much younger and prettier, but hey that's the way these things go. This time it's Kay Lenz - best known then, and probably still, for her lead in Clint Eastwood's BREEZY (1973) - as Karen Sheldon, a crusading reporter who gets fired up about the drug problems in the city (specifically the dealers - this is not a film where the reasons behind drug use are ever going to be mentioned, not once) after her teenage daughter winds up dead of an overdose early on.
Paul, of course, has his own methods for dealing with the scumbags, and he soon gives the guy who dealt the kid an electrifying sendoff to the next world - but someone's got his number, and soon our vigilante (still somehow able to get a job as a high-profile architect despite all this moving back and forth from city to city and being in his late 60s now) is contacted in his lovely home by Nathan White (John P. Ryan), a well-known and wealthy publishing mogul, who has also suffered losses in his family due to those filthy drug lords. White wants Kersey to deal with the scum, and is prepared to finance his one-man war against the two rival gangs that control the LA narcotics traffic. Kersey accepts almost immediately and so the battle begins. He plays the two rivals against each other, showing up at a party as a waiter and tapping the phone of one, blowing up a gathering of lieutenants of another gang, and sending another top gangster on a one-way ticket down a dozen stories. Meanwhile the cops are onto the fact that "the vigilante" is back in action, and they're after him even as the rival gangs start to figure out that they're being played. But they're not the only ones, as Kersey discovers just when he thinks he's finished the job....
This plot twist which occurs about 2/3 of the way through can be seen a mile away by any viewer who is not half-comatose; problem is Kersey would have to be asleep not to see what's going on also, and I guess he is. The first Death Wish was reasonably well put-together without any gaping lapses in logic, and Kersey was always just barely escaping detection; the second followed the same program more or less, while the third just amped things up to a ridiculous point so that you just didn't care. This seems at some points to be going for the epic level of violence the previous film offered but doesn't quite manage to dispel some of these lingering plot issues, because they're just so damn huge. If a guy can play two gangs against each other, isn't he supposed to be smart enough to figure out when he's being duped? And Bronson's age is pretty hard to ignore at this point, and the rest of the cast doesn't exactly provide enormous excitement. Soon-Tek Oh is probably the most recognizable name besides Bronson and Lenz, playing a typically shady-seeming cop, but neither he nor anybody else is playing anything beyond cardboard. Danny Trejo also has a tiny little role, but it's hardly worth a look just for him.
Still there are some decent action sequences, including a nice shootout in an oilfield where Bronson gets in one of his typically terse, humorless one-liners. New director J. Lee Thompson, replacing Michael Winner who had done the first three, doesn't have quite the same over-the-top, balls-out sensibility, but he does put together a slightly tighter narrative, and there's some all right L.A. location work, and the unpretentiousness of a lot of lower-budget 80s action films - this was produced by Cannon, after they'd had a bunch of flops and were slashing costs left and right. This is probably one of the reasons for a number of fairly stupid scenes, such as a moment where Bronson is all alone and weaponless in the middle of a warehouse, and he just lies flat - with no cover at all - while several bad guys fire at him with automatic weapons from maybe 15 yards and fail to hit him. After this he manages to escape the warehouse by beating off or killing a dozen guys, without a scratch. Ah well, it's the movies, even 66-year-old Charles Bronson gets to be unstoppable.
Much like the 2nd and 3rd films, this suffers from a mediocre DVD issue. It would be awesome if somebody could put out the whole series as a set with new widescreen transfers and some supplementary materials, but as they're owned by three different companies (at the moment) that seems unlikely. Well, one can dream.
Description of Death Wish 4: The Crackdown
No Description Available.Genre: Feature Film-Action/Adventure
Rating: R
Release Date: 13-DEC-2005
Media Type: DVD
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