Critics Hate The Bruce Willis Death Wish Remake, And Now I’m DEFINITELY Seeing It.

OH HELL YEAH.

In case you haven’t seen the trailer for Bruce Willis in the remake of Death Wish (which originally starred Charles Bronson), check this out.

Now, ordinarily, that would be a movie that I wouldn’t see in the theater, but would definitely catch while my husband had it on Netflix. This is how I end up watching most thrillers/action movies. And I always end up enjoying them way more than I think I will. As long as there’s not a whole lot of gratuitous gore or blood (I’m one of the few people who loathe the movie Pulp Fiction with the fury of a billion suns for that very reason) I’m game. Basically, if it’s a Tarantino flick, count me out. If it’s Bruce Willis in something Die-Hard-y, which this appears to be, COUNT ME ALL THE WAY IN.

And now that I’ve read that a whole bunch of critics from the New York Times, NPR, the LA Times, etc. etc. find Death Wish to be “NRA-crowd” friendly, I’m even more in.

According to the sourcelink, liberal critics are HATING this Death Wish remake. Entertainment Weekly wrote:

I suspect that Roth accomplished exactly what he set out to do with Death Wish. But the marketing of the film is another matter entirely. It has an unmistakable stink of rah-rah Make America Great Again-ness to it. It’s patriotic red meat thrown to the NRA crowd. I know some of you will say, “Relax, it’s just a movie.” Fair enough. But movies don’t exist in a vacuum. And Death Wish, as undeniably effective as it is on a primal gut level, should have probably stayed where it belonged. In the past.

Well, we can’t have rah-rah MAGA patriotism, now can we!! That just wouldn’t do at all. What do people think this is – America?

Canada’s Globe and Mail said:

“There is no clear explanation as to why Roth decided today’s world needed to revisit the franchise’s ultra-right-wing dog whistling. Perhaps a George Zimmerman biopic fell apart due to rights issues, and this was the closest producers could get. Or maybe the cinema needs just that much more sickeningly sincere gun fetishization – they’ve certainly got an audience in Senator Marco Rubio, so that’s one ticket sold.”

That makes me want to go see it TONIGHT.

The LA Times called the movie a “feature-length NRA informercial.” The NYT said it’s “ready-made for an NRA ad campaign.”

NPR blamed the appeal of the movie on “maleness.” FOR REAL:

What do you reasonably expect to find in a review of a film that has been so ruthlessly engineered to target the pleasure-centers of the most fearful and fragile cohort of American maleness? To deliver unto them an elaborately contrived series of events meant to prove that their view of the world is both only correct — and the only correct one?

Do you expect me to tell you that the film is not the thin and cynical fever-dream of those who ache to be reassured that cities are cesspits, the police ineffectual, and, as one character (Len Cariou, what are you doing?) intones, “If a man wants to protect his own [cocks shotgun], he has to do it himself”? Because it is that. It is precisely that.

The sourcelink piece concludes: “For some Americans, the fact that Death Wish is not approved by the New York Times, NPR and others just might make it more appealing.”

That’s damn right.

Plus, Bruce Willis is super foxy. 🙂