Death Sentence (2007)

Death Sentence. Film review. In order to make a film that takes revenge as a subject worked, it needs to deliver a character that undergoes the revenge to be believable and gets our sympathy. It usually goes as follows. Put some lovable ordinary Joe (or Jane) into an imaginary perfect and happy life. Take it away from him, and give him a reason to enact a revenge. Three keywords, ordinary, lovable and believable. I love Kevin Bacon. I really do. I never look into his films and finding not loving it despite anything. Heck, i like Hollow Man! Given that thought, you know that i would squeeze the juice to the last drop to made myself in a position to actually liked this film.

Nick (Kevin Bacon) a senior VP in a financial business company, led a happy life. He has a nice family, lovely wife, and two sons he could be proud of. James Wan put a various footage from a home-made Christmas video that spans several years of his life to show how he has led this perfect life. It was believable and since i know how the film would spun its tail, it gave me a pang of sadness (you need to believe in Kevin Bacon to feel so. In my case, it's love). On a faithful night, when Nick and his oldest son take a stop on an overnight gas-station, a bunch of gang collides with his path. It turns out that this gang made an initiation acceptance to one of its newest members by putting him up for a random kill to an unlucky passerby. Brendan, Nick's eldest son, is the unlucky one.

Every revenge film follows a pre-determined path. It's jut like a board-game of snake and ladder where you start on a square one, rolled the dice and race to the finish line. How long, and what obstacles you faced along the race is what made things interesting. You know the square one and you know the finish line. What matters is what lies in between.

It took forty minutes to get the ball rolling, and once it's rolled, there's no stopping as not only did Nick, an ordinary working Joe risked for his life, but he also risked his remaining family against a gang which doesn't shy away in the business of killing.

Or so i had thought. The fact were these, despite i could very much spare much of my sympathy with Nick (read: Kevin Bacon), the pacing to the rest of the film was uneven throughout. After the forty minutes mark i mentioned earlier, i had expected that the film's pace would be fast or at least interesting enough to keep me engaged. Rather than that, i found the film's direction was rather jumbled and confused to sit through. It would seems that James Wan wanted to put some moral thought, some kind of a legitimate justification to Nick's choices and i was really really put off with the superhero-esque gun-duel at the final climax of the film.

James Wan from Saw directed this film. Therefore, the film doesn't shy away to show some violence and red-colored liquid and latex body parts. A nice niche if you asked me. Because after all, like it or not, i believe that there's a dark side among each and everyone of us that wished a very tremendously ill and terrible shit to happen to those who responsible of what had befell to our family, friends, a stranger on the screen that we love, even in order to justify our needs for a bloody and painful revenge.