#14: Death Wish 4: The Crackdown

Release Date: November 6th, 1987

Format: Streaming (Max)

Written by: Gail Morgan Hickman

Directed by: J. Lee Thompson

3 Stars

I’m having a great time with these Death Wish movies. This one is more of a competent exploitation movie than it is a good-bad movie like Death Wish 3. Surprisingly, it’s hard to even compare the two movies. Despite having Charles Bronson running around with a grenade launcher in both, they almost belong in different genres. 

Death Wish 3 exists in an alternate reality devoid of law and order and basic logic. Death Wish 4 is absurd, no doubt, but at least grounds its plot in a real world. There are rival drug dealers, an innocent girl killed via drug overdose, and a millionaire tabloid publisher that wants to hire Charles Bronson to enact revenge on the whole Los Angeles drug trade in response. There is also a great plot twist at the end. With a bigger budget, this could easily become a genuinely good action movie. 

But, like I said, Death Wish 4 is also absurd. Throughout 95% of the movie Charles Bronson continues to run a high-profile architectural firm in downtown Los Angeles by day, while he’s blowing away drug dealers and scumbags at night (including a young Danny Trejo, playing an Italian-American of all things. It’s a movie about the drug trade in Los Angeles, and they have a 30-year-old Danny Trejo, and they decide to make his character Italian-American. Okay.)

So what we have here is a fun exploitation movie. Really fun. I think it’s time to go back and watch 1 and 2. I haven’t built up the nerve to watch 5, which is supposedly truly, truly bad.