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Still, for a short time Death Wish successfully portrays its protagonist as a broken, sympathetic man. His world has been shattered, and the justice system has seemingly walked away from the problem. When he finally takes to the streets looking for blood he finds it, and feels justified as he pumps round after round into his first victim. But taking a human life is not a line you just can step back across. You almost feel for Paul as he struggles - at first anyway - with the moral implications of what he's done. We even pause (briefly) to wonder whether fighting lawlessness with lawlessness is a battle of diminishing returns.

But it doesn’t last long. For the most part, Wendel Mayes' screenplay juggles some pretty complex social issues with all the nuance of a flaming jackhammer. The criminals are all portrayed as slavering lunatics; willful exaggerations designed to make the idea of vengeance seem less poisonous than it is. The script pays lip service to both sides of the issue, yet it revels openly in the idea of street justice, to a point just short of propaganda. There are many themes here, but no question where the movie stands.

Modern values are corrupt. The Old Ways are best. Vengeance is the Lord’s, unless the Lord is busy, and then it’s all yours. Whatever your problem is, one bullet can solve it. They should have just cast Charlton Heston in the lead and named the character Dick Flagg. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with a straight up revenge flick. But the social themes this movie pretends to explore aren’t potent enough to support the mindless brutality it clearly endorses. And there’s no winking irony, either. Death Wish doesn’t want you to think, it wants you to agree.

I'm not saying it's a terrible film. It's just not very good. Bronson himself makes a convincing killer, but he’s sure as hell no architect. To call his range “limited” is to call Bill Gates “moderately well off." He and Michael Winner are best known for this film, but I wonder if this is more due to the controversy it created than the quality of the movie. What's worse is that whether you consider this a “message movie” or vengeance porn, it does a lousy job of tying things together thematically.

Not to spoil anything, but if you were going on a citywide revenge spree, what would you consider the difference between success and failure? There are only so many ways to answer that, and Death Wish is far too busy patting itself on the back to seriously address any of them. After all the rape and murder, all the violence and jingoistic doubletalk, in the end this movie doesn’t have the guts to commit to anything. It’s a story about violence for the sake of violence, pretending to be something else.
It’s not a Death Wish, it’s a copout.

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