Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		2.5

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown Blu-ray Movie Review

Death Wish 4: Scarjimbo

Reviewed by Casey Broadwater August 16, 2012

A former coal-miner, B-29 gunner during WWII, and star of wacky Japanese commercials—follow that link, you won't regret it—Charles 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 gracelessly—the street-punk fashion, for instance, is an unintentional laugh riot—the 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 Wish—they seem to be in no hurry to get a high definition edition out—and 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, tired—not just thematically, Bronson himself looks exhausted—and 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 reveal—dun dun dun—his 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 slinger—who gets capped and then falls onto the electrified ceiling of a bumper car arena, showering sparks below—but 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 scene—and look out for a young Danny Trejo in a bit part—he 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 moments—like a panicked roller rink shoot-out or the climactic, grenade launcher-assisted face-off between Kersey and a combatant I’ll leave unnamed—but we’ve seen this all before, and done far better before.

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Let's start by acknowledging that the Death Wish films have never and—unless 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 DNR—which would be a very bad thing indeed—there'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 few—if any—white 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 quality—chunky, 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.

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

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.

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The lone bonus feature on the disc is a theatrical trailer, in high definition.

Death Wish 4: The Crackdown Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The Crackdown is the lesser of the three Death Wish films being released this week by MGM—it's not as disturbing as part two, not as a over-the-top crazy as part three—but 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.