DEATH SENTENCE

Nick Hume is a quiet family man. One night, at an isolated gas station, he witnesses the murder of his son by a gang of robbers. Devastated by grief, he decides to take justice into his own hands by killing one of the robbers, the material author of the murder, who turns out to be the brother of the leader of one of the most dangerous gangs in the city. This triggers an unstoppable spiral of violence and marks the beginning of the end for the new vigilante. The 70s and 80s gave us a gallery of antiheroes who remained in the collective imagination of an entire generation. Tough and anything but pure vigilantes, children of the vast American metropolises, demanded by a society now exhausted and pessimistic. And cinema has largely fed on this perception, this chaos, producing and serializing characters ranging from the rough-around-the-edges cop (Shaft, Callaghan) to the citizen vigilante, family man, victim of violence that cracks and destroys his values, turning him into a executioner. Bronson and his vigilante by night represent the archetype of this very genre that is coming back into fashion. After a decade, the 90s, where characters become politically correct and violence becomes stylized to the extreme, the latest film productions draw, perhaps children of a new wave of latent insecurity, from the genre without feeling the need to reinvent it, because in the end the fears are the same, but revisiting it in a postmodern key filled with comic book hyperviolence. Bacon is a happy and fulfilled man who, after witnessing the murder of his son, plunges into an abyss of despair that leads to an instinct for revenge that he will carry out and pay dearly for. James Wan crafts a lucid urban western halfway between Tarantino and Michael Bay, not having however the anarchic madness of the former, but approaching the visual imprint of the latter. The numerous ultraviolent scenes will satisfy the palates of gore lovers... let's not forget that Wan is one of the creators of the "Saw" saga. The cast does not disappoint: Bacon, always balancing between anger and despair, takes many risks, sketching a character perhaps a bit cartoonish but always credible, even where the screenplay does not help him at all. Special praise to John Goodman, the slimy and degenerate parent/fence at the head of the gang of bad guys, always in part and great professional. In conclusion, "Death Sentence" is a worthy genre product, a harder version of the more committed and prestigious "The Silence of the Lambs" by Neil Jordan, it gives us almost two hours of tension and adrenaline that, in a landscape saturated with laughable action movies and predictable thrillers, is a pleasant surprise.