Death Wish



Death Wish is a 1974 action-crime-drama film based on the 1972 novel by Brian Garfield (who also wrote Death Sentence). The film was directed by Michael Winner and stars Charles Bronson (the actor, not the prisoner).

The film was a major commercial success and generated a movie franchise lasting four sequels over a twenty-year period. The film was denounced by critics as advocating vigilantism and unlimited punishment to criminals, but it was seen as echoing a growing mood in the United States as crime rose during the 1970s.

The Death Wish Pentalogy:


 * Death Wish (1974) - The movie that started it all, where New York architect Paul Kersey has his world shattered forever when his apartment is attacked by three vicious punks, who murder his wife and rape his daughter. After being sent to Arizona by his boss to meet with a client, Kersey takes an interest in guns and eventually has one slipped into his bag by the client as he's preparing to return to New York (this was back before things like hijackers and airline security were an issue). Upon his return, Kersey starts dispensing justice to the scum on the streets, shooting down any mugger that tries to rob him. The police want him arrested, but the public are behind him, glad that someone's doing something to clean up the streets. Kersey is eventually asked to leave New York to avoid prosecution, much like the Old West vigilantes of long ago
 * Death Wish II (1982) - Paul Kersey and his daughter settle in Los Angeles. After an incident with muggers in an amusement park, brutality hits too close to home again when the muggers attack his new home, and Kersey's poor daughter is raped again along with his housekeeper before both of them are killed. Unlike the last movie, Kersey doesn't target random muggers this time, instead focusing his wrath upon the five scumbags who victimized him and his family.
 * Death Wish 3 (1985) - Kersey returns to New York to visit an old buddy from his days in the Korean War, only to find him dead after another attack by gang-punks. He is mistakenly arrested for the murder, but the head cop offers him a deal: reporting any gang activity to him in exchange for being able to kill all the punks he wants. Kersey moves into the buddy's old apartment, where he and his neighbors are viciously attacked by the gang, and things escalate until an all-out urban war erupts in the final fifteen minutes, leading to Charles Bronson's biggest onscreen kill count ever. It is also the movie that popularized the Wildey Survivor pistol in .475 Wildey Magnum.
 * Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987) - Kersey returns to Los Angeles. The vigilante is unleashed again after the daughter of Paul Kersey's girlfriend from Death Wish 3 dies of a crack overdose, and her boyfriend is gunned down by the pusher who sold her the crack. After gunning down the pusher, Kersey is approached by a publisher who knows of the guy's death and wants to hire him to wipe out the drug trade by taking down two drug gangs. Kersey does what he does best and blasts both gangs to hell, but is betrayed by the publisher, who it turns out is actually an ambitious drug dealer under a false identity who is seeking to take over the local drug business and has tricked him into doing the dirty work for him. Kersey's girlfriend is kidnapped by the Big Bad's men, and the stage is set for a final showdown.
 * Death Wish V: The Face of Death (1994) - Kersey returns to New York again, this time planning to settle down with a new girlfriend. But the girlfriend is involved in a mob case involving her ex-husband, a vicious mobster against whom the police want her to testify. When the mobster's goons disfigure her in a bid to keep her from testifying, Paul is warned by the cops not to return to his vigilante ways. But things go straight to hell when the girlfriend is gunned down, the mobster is "cleared" of all charges, and the girlfriend's daughter is kidnapped despite Kersey's best efforts to protect her, and Kersey must take the law into his own hands one more time for a final showdown.

For a character with a death wish, see Death Seeker.

"Paul: "Hey, Freddie. I'm gonna take care of your dandruff problem for you." Freddie: "Nooooooooooooooooooo!!!" [Paul detonates the soccer ball]"
 * Actionized Sequel: Death Wish 3 and the actionizing goes even further with 4 and 5.
 * Agony of the Feet: Paul puts a board full of nails on front of his bathroom window for burglars. It doesn't take long before one steps on it.
 * Attempted Rape: There are some rapists that Paul manages to shoot before they can start anything.
 * Badass: Paul. By the series end he's a Badass Grandpa too.
 * Beware the Nice Ones: Paul is a pacifist, but he learned to use guns during his younger years as a combat medic in the Korean War. And it shows.
 * Big No: Freddie Flakes' last words before being blown up and burned to death by a remote controlled soccer ball, controlled by Paul in Death Wish V:

"Paul Kersey: Do you believe in Jesus? Stomper: Yes I do. Paul Kersey: Well, you're gonna meet him."
 * California Doubling: Death Wish 3 was set in New York, but filmed in London.
 * Cartwright Curse: One of the series' most notorious traits. See Disposable Woman entry below. About the only woman close to Kersey who DOESN'T end up dead is his girlfriend in the second film and even then, she leaves him after finding out that he's a vigilante.
 * Concealment Equals Cover: Averted in 2 and 3, with fatal results for those who try it against Kersey.
 * Dirty Cop: Phil Nozaki in 4 and FBI Agent Vasguez in 5.
 * Disposable Woman: Kersey's wife in the first film, his daughter in the second, girlfriends in the third, fourth, and fifth films, numerous non-Kersey women in all films -- basically, if you're female and hang around Paul Kersey, you're pretty much screwed.
 * Subverted with his girlfriend in the second film. She still disappears after breaking up with him (after finding out that he's a vigilante), but at least she's alive.
 * Drugs Are Bad: Drugs play a big part in The Crackdown.
 * Every Car Is a Pinto: A car blows up in 2 after it falls off from a cliff. Justified because it was the car of a small-time Arms Dealer.
 * More ludicrous example happens in 3, when the car Kathryn is in slowly rolls down a hill, hits another car and they're both engulfed by huge explosions.
 * Film of the Book
 * Friend to All Children: Being a father, Paul has a soft spot for kids as shown in Death Wish 3 and 4.  The former having him buy ice cream for one of the neighborhood kids while the latter being his relationship with Erica, the daughter of his girlfriend Karen. God help you if you happen to harm a kid or have been known to harm children while Paul is within an earshot of that info.
 * Hand Cannon: Paul's friend "Wildey" (more specifically, the .475 Wildey Magnum) from 3. Currently the most powerful semiautomatic handgun in the world.
 * Karma Houdini: The three muggers and rapists from the first film, who start Kersey's road toward vigilantism, are never caught by the cops or killed by Kersey.
 * Man On Fire: Three people burn to death in 3 during the climactic urban war between the criminals and the locals.
 * May-December Romance: Bronson is 25-30 years older than his love interests in films 3-5.
 * More Dakka: In Death Wish 3 and Death Wish 4, Kersey uses a .30 caliber M1919 and a M16 with an M203 respectively.
 * New York Subway: In the first film, two muggers try to rob Paul on the subway. They do not survive.
 * Obstructive Vigilantism: Used by Paul in the second movie, when the cops show up to his house after the break-in.
 * Police Are Useless: The entire franchise runs on this as one of many motivations to why Paul Kersey resorts to Vigilantism. In the first movie, there's a more grounded realistic reason why this trope is in play.  At the time, New York was one of the cities in the world that had the highest crime rates. This movie specifically mentions muggings and rapes alone happening to thousands of people, by different criminals.  Which is why it was hard for them to search for the ones that attacked Carol and Joanna.  As the sequels went on the police, save for a select few, started to degrade in usefulness in an effort to make Paul's methods look more effective by comparison.
 * Pop Star Composer: Jimmy Page did the score for the second film.
 * Pre-Mortem One-Liner: From Death Wish 2:

"Mugger: Who the fuck are you? Paul Kersey: Death."
 * And from 4:


 * Rape as Drama: Kersey's daughter was raped and his wife was killed, all for drama and motivation. Also the rape/murder is played for exploitation turn-on, which makes all of the subsequent action seem more than a bit hypocritical. Paul's daughter is raped again during the second film (along with Kersey's housekeeper), and in the third film, Maria, one of Kersey's friends, is raped and killed despite Kersey's best efforts to protect her.
 * Reasonable Authority Figure: While most police officer characters on the show are considered incompetent in the series, there is a select few, that do try to get the job done. Ironically most of them do so, going after Kersey for vigilantism.
 * The first is Officer Joe Charles. He is one of the few cops, Kersey seems to trust more than the others.  Since he's a beat cop, he can only tell Kersey the information he got from Carol and leads him to the detective on the case.  Said detective, while sympathetic, somewhat qualifies, because he's honest in the chances of finding the people that attacked his wife and daughter.  After Paul's vigilante antics make the news, while the cops begin to suspect him, Charles genuinely shows up and inquires how he's doing and how Carol is doing. Which doesn't seem like a ploy to get him to admit his vigilantism.
 * Lieutenant Frank Ochoa in the first two movies. With the help of his team at the precinct, the detective is able to narrow down the list of suspects in the Vigilante case, based on personal vendettas with muggers. By the time he's able to figure out Kersey is responsible for the crimes, his higher ups don't want him arrested. Instead, they want him to scare him out of his crusade or at least get him to move out of New York.  Unlike most examples where the crusader cop would protest it, Ochoa follows the orders.
 * Police Chief Richard Shriker in the third movie. He seems like a Rabid Cop at first, even busting Kersey despite knowing he didn't kill Charlie.  However he reveals to be a fan of his work and enlist his help in taking down a major gang in New York. Which basically amounts to letting Kersey loose in exchange for the occasional police tip.  During the final gang fight, he backs Kersey up while the cops and locals deal with the rest of the warring gangs.
 * The weirdest example, but still counts. Detective Phil Nozaki in the fourth movie. He at first seems like an honest cop. He's genuine friends with his partner, Sid Reiner and is the first to figure out that the rising drug war between Ed Zacharias and The Romero brothers, was the work of Paul Kersey.  However it turns out he is a Dirty Cop working for Zacharias, but even then on both sides he's still reasonable.  He informs Zacharias that the Romeros weren't responsible for his recent troubles, which Zacharias tried to tell the Romeros during the final war.  On the other side, he doesn't want to kill Kersey despite Zacharias orders to do so.  So he tries to bluff Kersey into giving up information on who he worked for. Kersey took no chances and killed him.
 * Detective Sid Reiner. He seems like a jerk cop at first, snarking at the first witness to Kersey's return to vigilantism.  However he's a competent cop regardless and backs his partner Phil Nozaki.  Things take a bit of a turn when he finds out Kersey killed Phil.  He didn't know that Phil was crooked, so as far as he was concerned, Kersey went too far by killing a cop. Not backing down when Kersey tried to leave to rescue Karen. Not believing Kersey when he explains Phil's corruption. When Kersey loses Karen and kills the fake Nathan White, he let's Kersey go. Seeing losing his girlfriend as punishment enough.
 * Reality Ensues: One thing this movie series has, that rarely happens in action flicks is it shows how real the consequences of vigilantism is. At least once per movie, Paul suffers one or two wounds that require him to patch himself up. Averting the Invincible Hero cliche many action characters before and after this series. It also shows how quick the police respond when word of mysterious increasing deaths of criminals has gone around. Such as in the first movie, where they almost immediately figure out Paul's motive before finding out he was the vigilante.
 * Recycled Soundtrack: Some music in The Crackdown was taken from Missing in Action and Invasion USA.
 * Retirony: In Death Wish 3. As if her hooking up with Paul isn't bad enough, by the time Kathryn Davis declares her intent to quit her job as a public defender and move to a new city for a fresh start, it's obvious she's doomed.
 * Roaring Rampage of Revenge: When the first movie starts, Kersey is essentially a pacifist until his wife is murdered and his daughter raped into catatonia, then turns violent against criminals. While all five of the films have Kersey seeking vengeance, Death Wish 2 is perhaps the one that most resembles this particular trope.
 * Same Language Dub: Some of the extras in 3 were dubbed over due to their British accents.
 * Sequel Escalation: The bodycount per film for the first four films rise as the series progress.
 * Sock It to Them: In the first film Kersey gets $20 worth of rolled quarters, puts them into a sock, practices swinging the flail around in his apartment, and then carries it around during the day. Soon someone with a knife tries to mug him, and a single hit makes the other guy drop the knife and try to run away, go headfirst into a wall, and then stumble off.
 * Unwitting Pawn: Paul becomes one in The Crackdown.
 * Viewers are Morons: Third film's number was supposed to be roman like in the second film, but it was changed because it was believed that Americans don't understand roman numbering.
 * Vigilante Man: Death Wish is probably the Trope Codifier for this character type in media.
 * What Happened to the Mouse?: In the third movie, Kersey's friend Rodriguez leaves in the middle of a town-wide gunfight to reload his zip gun. He doesn't appear again. He's probably deader than a doornail.
 * Wretched Hive: New York.