Death Wish 4: The Crackdown Blu-ray offers solid video and audio, but overall it's a mediocre Blu-ray release
Architect/vigilante Paul Kersey takes on the members of a vicious Los Angeles drug cartel to stop the flow of drugs after his girlfriend's daughter dies from an overdose.
A former coal-miner, B-29 gunner during WWII, and star of wacky Japanese
commercialsfollow that link, you won't regret itCharles Bronson is best known, of course, as an onscreen badass, a pistol-wielding action hero
who was making chumps quake in their shoes long before Schwarzenegger and Stallone and Willis. He was one of The Dirty Dozen. He played
a mean harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West. And, with 1974's Death Wish, he attained pop culture icon status for his
portrayal of Paul Kersey, a mild-mannered New York architect who goes on a violent crime-fighting rampage after thugs rape his daughter and murder
his wife. The film addresses the rotten core of the Big Apple, which was experiencing a nascent crime wave at the time, and it became controversial for
seemingly advocating that citizens take the law into their own hands.
Along with a few alleged copycat acts of vigilantism, Death Wish launched a franchise that spanned four sequels of mostly diminishing quality,
with Kersey finding himself in ever more contrived revenge scenarios. Although they pale next to the original and have aged rather gracelesslythe
street-punk fashion, for instance, is an unintentional laugh riotthe sequels are solidly entertaining in an ironic, so-bad-it's-good, what-the-hell-were-
we-thinking-in-the-1980s kind of way. This week, MGM is releasing Death Wish 2, Death Wish 3, and Death Wish 4: The
Crackdown on Blu-ray, and I already know what you're going to ask: Where are the first and last films? Good question, and one with a ready
answer. Paramount holds the rights to Death Wishthey seem to be in no hurry to get a high definition edition outand Death Wish
5 is currently licensed by Lionsgate. This leaves the middle three films, which have been sitting for some time in MGM's back catalog but are now
loosed on the streets again, with new 1080p transfers this time, and presented in their intended aspect ratio.
"Death..."
Unless we're talking about Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, if a movie title has a "IV" or the less-classy "4" after it, followed by a dippy subtitle,
it's almost guaranteed to be awful. Look no further than Leprechaun 4: In Space, or any other horror franchise that's made it beyond "Part
III." Death Wish 4: The Crackdown is no different; it's unnecessary, tirednot just thematically, Bronson himself looks exhaustedand simply
not up to the standard of the first three films, as low as that standard may be.
Taking over for Michael Winner, the film was directed by J. Lee Thompson, a prolific English filmmaker best known for Cape Fear and The
Guns of Navarone, but who spent the last part of his career churning out pulpy low-budget B-movies for Cannon Films, including Kinjite:
Forbidden Subjects and Messenger of Death, all starring Charles Bronson. Working off a script by Gail Morgan Hickman, Thompson
backpedaled a bit from the simple, over-the-top absurdity of Death Wish 3, delivering a more plot-heavy story that plays like a cheapo mash-
up of Scarface and Yojimbo.
If that description excites you in any way, temper your expectations. The emphasis is decidedly on cheapo. The Crackdown does get
off to a memorable start, with a dream sequence that features Bronson's stoic Paul Kersey character rescuing a potential rape victim from a trio of
thugs. When one of the guys asks "Who the f--k are you?," Kersey cooly replies, "Death," and kills them all. After gunning down the last punk, he rolls
over the body to revealdun dun dunhis own face. Kersey wakes up in a cold sweat; he's been out of the vigilante gangster-killing
business for two years and happily back to his usual gig, designing buildings in Los Angeles. He's dating single mom Karen Sheldon (Kay Lenz), and it
looks like they're moving towards some kind of permanent commitment, but when Karen's teenaged daughter dies of a cocaine overdose, Kersey goes
right back into the revenge trade.
He tracks down and kills the responsible dope slingerwho gets capped and then falls onto the electrified ceiling of a bumper car arena, showering
sparks belowbut his vigilante ambitions are broadened when he's summoned by newspaper owner Nathan White (John P. Ryan), whose own
daughter has recently O.D.'d. White hires Kersey to take down the kingpins of L.A.'s drug scene, brothers Jack and Tony Romero (Mike Moroff and Dan
Ferro), and their rival Ed Zacharias (Perry Lopez), all three flat, cardboard cutout movie-versions of what extravagantly wealthy dealers should be.
And so Kersey embarks on his own personal war on drugs, playing the two coke empires against one another in order to better infiltrate them both.
Like Toshiro Mifune's ronin in Yojimbo, or Clint Eastwood's nameless gunslinger in A Fistful of Dollars, Kersey strategically offs
underlings from either side in order to stir up a war, giving himself an advantage. In one sceneand look out for a young Danny Trejo in a bit parthe
poses as a vintner at a posh Italian restaurant where Zacharias' hit-men are having dinner, and serves up a bottle of wine that has a bomb hidden in a
secret compartment. Later, staging a meet-up around an oil derrick on the outskirts of town, he hides in the hills above with a sniper rifle, picking off
baddies here and there but mostly letting the two gangs kill each other. Meanwhile, Kersey is being pursued by two cops who are trying to get to the
bottom of gang war.
There are two twists leading into the final act, and I guarantee at least one will catch you off guard. The plotting of Death Wish 4 is definitely
more intricate than in the previous sequels, but after the deliriously campy highs of the third film, The Crackdown seems unusually sober, and
even a little dull. That's not to say there aren't a few memorably outré momentslike a panicked roller rink shoot-out or the climactic, grenade
launcher-assisted face-off between Kersey and a combatant I'll leave unnamedbut we've seen this all before, and done far better before.
Let's start by acknowledging that the Death Wish films have never andunless there's some picture quality witchery I don't yet know about
will never look particularly sharp or slick. Not by modern standards. These were fairly low-budget productions, shot non-anamorphically on fast
and heavily grainy 35mm stock, and short of slathering the picture with detail-smearing DNRwhich would be a very bad thing indeedthere's not
much that can be done to separate the content of the image from it's noisy medium. MGM has wisely steered clear of unnecessary digital
tinkering, doing only what's needed to get the films in strong high definition shape. I'm not sure how much restoration/clean-up was required, but the
prints of all three Death Wish films are practically spotless, with fewif anywhite specks, and no scratches, stains, or debris. And while the
movies have been placed on single-layer 25 GB discs, I didn't spot any overt compression issues. To my eye, these transfers look faithful to source.
Though it was made five years after Death Wish 2, Death Wish 4: The Crackdown has remarkably similar picture qualitychunky,
grainy, and decidedly soft. That said, if you're familiar with the DVD, you'll notice a definite increase in clarity, with better refined textures and cleaner
lines, especially in closeups. As with the other two films, color seems accurate and stable, with no obvious fading or fluctuations, and contrast is good.
Whether or not to upgrade will be a personal preference, but fans of the film will be glad to see it looking better than ever possible on DVD.
Cheaply shot and churned out, Cannon Films productions in general were rarely given much audio polish. Although stereo and even multi-channel mixes
were already common when the movies were made, all three Death Wish films released this week by MGM are in mono, via lossless DTS-HD
Master Audio 1.0 tracks. Considering all of the gunfire, explosions, and car crashes, you can easily imagine these films in 5.1, with immersive ambience
and directional effects galore, but you can't dock MGM for being true-to-source. All three films have rather flat dynamics, with tempered bass, a soft high
end, and much of the audio packed into the mids. Gunshots are typically wimpy, and most of the effects clearly sound canned, but there's some low-
budget B-movie charm here in the rinky-dink presentation. By the time Death Wish 4 was in production, Cannon Films was sliding towards
bankruptcy, and apparently couldn't fund a new score. Instead, the film features musical cues from other Cannon releases, like 1985's Chuck Norris
vehicle, Invasion U.S.A. Though a far cry from the Herbie Hancock score for the original Death Wish, the music here is at least cleanly
recorded and relatively robust. Dialogue is always understandable too, though if you need or want them, the disc includes optional English SDH and
Spanish subtitles, along with a French Dolby Digital 1.0 dub.
The Crackdown is the lesser of the three Death Wish films being released this week by MGMit's not as disturbing as part two, not as a
over-the-top crazy as part threebut for lovers of cheeseball low-budget action movies, I suppose it does have a somewhat redeeming so-bad-it's-good
quality, with a haggard-looking Charles Bronson taking out comic book-style drug dealers. There are no new special features here, but MGM's Blu-ray
does feature a decent jump in clarity, which may be enough to convince some fans to trade in their old full-frame DVDs.