A few weeks ago I watched (the original) Death Wish. If I’d ever seen all of it I don’t recall, so for all intents and purposes this was my first time watching the movie. To summarize: liberal wishy-washy architect, Charles Bronson, has his wife murdered and his daughter raped into a coma by random street thugs. He decides there is no justice in the law and takes the law into his own hands by luring thugs into assaulting him and then blowing them away with his big gun (that’s not a euphemism).
For its time the movie really spoke to people. New York in 1974 was a crime ridden shit hole and many people thought the cops and the government in general weren’t doing enough to keep people safe. So the idea of a good man doing the job the cops wouldn’t (or couldn’t) was really exciting.
I love a good vigilante story as much as the next guy. After all, that’s the core of most super hero narratives. But what something like Death Wish, or even Batman, are missing are the instances when the guy taking the law into his own hands gets it wrong.
In these stories the heroes have an almost omnipotent power to know who is doing right and who is doing wrong. A real human, which is what police officers are, lacks this. They can’t just immediately shoot anyone who looks suspicious…
“Oh, but that’s where you’re wrong! Cops are all evil and shoot black people all the time!”
Point proven. Humans are flawed. When a human, officer of the law or otherwise, just assumes someone is up to no good and blasts them, they will eventually make a bad call.
That’s what more vigilante stories need, that moment when our hero is on a winning streak and sees some young kid, probably a person of color, in a suspicious situation. He chases him down and brutally executes him, followed by a triumphant catch phrase. Only this kid wasn’t up to no good. He was just being a kid, out walking with no real purpose. He just wanted to get out of the house for a bit while his parents were arguing. He was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and by that I mean he was in the cross-hairs of a dangerous psychopath who thought he had all the answers to the world’s problems.
And then the sequel can be the young kid’s brother taking the law into his own hands because there is no justice in this world.
And then the third film can be about the sister of an innocent person the brother blew away seeking justice… and so on, and so on, and so on.
Armchair Screenwriter 