Death Sentence
If it’s possible to depict misery without feeling, “Death Sentence” pulls it off. Director James Wan, who also made “Saw,” wallows in gruesome extremes of human suffering, yet his slegehammer approach leaves you numb. He pummels you with pain and squalor but never fosters any empathy. I don’t want to be indifferent to the plight of a suburban dad whose family is brutalized by sociopathic goons, but when Wan swirls his camera around the bleeding victims and floods your ears with hack indie rock, it’s hard to feel like you’ve witnessed a tragedy – unless incompetent filmmaking makes you cry. In “Death Sentence,” the normally reliable Kevin Bacon overacts badly as the vengeance-minded father. He weeps, and the audience yawns, waiting for his next foray into vigilante justice. The ham-fisted theme of “Death Sentence” is that there are no winners in war, and I suppose it’s to the movie’s credit that the Bacon character takes no satisfaction from revenge. But that doesn’t make him any more plausible or specific. Wan appears desperate to shock, but he soft-pedals the class warfare inherent in the premise by inventing an inner-city drug gang that’s almost entirely white, with a token black member. I’m not suggesting such groups don’t exist, but if the bad guys were black or Latino, the movie might have been truly provocative – exploring the racism that lurks behind upper-class paranoia about urban crime. As it stands, “Death Sentence” plays like a dreary slog to the execution chamber.
LISTEN: Death Sentence