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Although the trailer for director Eli Roth’s remake of Charles Bronson’s iconic 1974 urban thriller Death Wish was released only minutes ago, and the film itself will not hit screens or be seen by critics until November, already the intolerant Left is screaming bloody murder and hurling outright lies.
Who knows what Roth’s final product will look like. But outside of already offending all the right people, Roth’s trailer is hands-down awesome and Willis hasn’t appeared this must-see in more than a decade.
Nevertheless, sight unseen, film critic Alan Zilberman is screaming FASCIST!
And here’s movie director Lexi Alexander screaming RACIST!
Alexander’s charge of racism is absurd. Watch the trailer again. The primary bad guys, the thugs who kill Kersey’s wife, look to be white, which is also true in the original film.
In fact, in all five of the original Death Wish entries the primary villains are white. In the one that started it all, the hoodlums who murder Kersey’s wife and rape his daughter are white (good grief you can’t get any whiter than Jeff Goldblum). The street gang that finishes off Kersey’s family in part two (one of the greatest movies ever made) are of mixed race. In part three, the gang is also mixed, but the leader, the arch-villain, is so white he has freckles.
In chapters four and five, the action moves from street gangs to white mobsters and corrupt tycoons.
Anyway, here is the most pathetic take, courtesy of leftwing film critic Scott Mendelson:
This shows you how slavish and censorious film critics have become in the face of one of the qualities art should sometimes be about — provocation.
The problem, though, is that unlike those of us on the Right who are battered 24/7 by a left-wing dominated culture that provokes us every hour of every day, leftists like Mendelson are spoiled, bubbled, sheltered, and this makes them intellectually weak. Nothing teaches them to cope with disagreement or intellectual adversity, so in those rare moments when something challenging comes along, their only coping mechanism is to want it to go away.
One obvious factor stirring up all these crybabies is the decision to put vigilante Paul Kersey (Willis) in a hoodie as he hunts himself down some street thugs. As we all know, after the justified self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin at the hands of George Zimmerman, the hoodie (which Martin was wearing at the time of his death) is now an iconic symbol embraced by social justice warriors.
Basically, in the hopes of elevating Martin into a leftwing martyr, the Left and their media allies portrayed the Hispanic Zimmerman as a blood-thirsty white guy hunting down young black men in hoodies. And there is no question that Roth’s decision to use this symbol is intentional and deliberately (and deliciously) provocative.
Moreover, in what can only be described as a major slap in the face to failed Democrat Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Roth moved the location of his remake from New York to Chicago. More than a slap in the face, it is also an acknowledgment of reality. Just as New York was seen as a dying city consumed by violence in 1974, so it is with Chicago today.
What must also be worrying to leftwing critics is the fact that the madness of gun control is a major theme in the first three Death Wish films. Innocent citizens are portrayed as helpless to street violence due to draconian gun laws. One wonders what Roth will have to say, if anything, about Chicago’s gun control laws, some of the strictest in the country.
If you are worried about a sucker punch, about Roth selling his movie in this way only to hit us with a joy-killing left-wing message in the end, if you have the stomach for it, check out the director’s Green Inferno, a blistering takedown of smugly ignorant and narcissistic environmentalists.
There is never any guarantee we won’t be sold out, but Roth is not a filmmaker afraid to make the pearl graspers grab their pearls.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.
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