LOS ANGELES — "Everybody thinks they're right in a war," Aisha Tyler's police detective warns Kevin Bacon's insurance man turned vigilante in "Death Sentence," a blood-spattering, stylized new revenge thriller from 20th Century Fox. "But everybody dies in the end."
It's a line full of meaning for Bacon's character, who witnessed his son's brutal murder and now is intent on wiping out the urban gang that did it.
But its allusion to warfare may also be a clue — subtle as a shotgun blast to the face — as to why revenge movies are making a comeback this season, as politics bleeds over into another film genre.
On Aug. 10, City Lights Pictures, a microdistributor in Manhattan, released the indie feature "Descent," in which Rosario Dawson plays a date-rape victim who exacts her own harrowing retribution. That film opened only on two screens, in New York and Los Angeles. But Fox takes the theme to cineplexes nationwide today, with "Death Sentence," directed by James Wan, who created the "Saw" franchise and now brings his trademark gruesomeness to a different genre.
And on Sept. 14, Warner Brothers follows with a slick New York vigilante thriller, "The Brave One," directed by Neil Jordan, in which Jodie Foster stars as a Central Park Jogger-like victim who is radicalized into a latter-day Bernhard H. Goetz.
The new movies signal a resurgence of interest in a genre that had its last heyday in the 1970s and '80s. The same production company that made "Death Sentence," for example, is also developing a remake for Fox of "The Star Chamber," the 1983 film in which Michael Douglas played a judge, frustrated by criminals' being let go because of legal loopholes, who joins a shadowy group offering a faster form of justice.
And a tangled web of copyright holders appears to be the only obstacle to a remake of "Death Wish," the 1974 Charles Bronson hit that spawned four sequels, according to Brian Garfield, who wrote the book on which the original was based.
The genre is also finding new audiences overseas. One of the most successful, and controversial, British films of the year so far was "Outlaw," which critics likened to both "Death Wish" and "Falling Down." It stars Sean Bean as a returning Iraq veteran who forms a gang that metes out deadly justice in a country plagued by violence and crippling political correctness. "Where we are in London I think is where New York was in the late '80s," said the film's director, Nick Love, by phone from a boat off Sardinia. "There's lots of gangs and shootings. It didn't use to
happen in England. People are feeling impotent. There is a feeling of like, 'Someone, do something about this."'
Garfield, who also wrote the novel that inspired "Death Sentence," said that he had long since moved on to other kinds of material, but that he understood why audiences today might be ready for a new wave of cathartic, rough justice at the movies. "People are just sort of simmering with the kind of anger that they can't really define, and this kind of movie gives them some kind of release," he said.
He recalled that when he saw "Death Wish" for the first time, in 1974, it was a late-afternoon matinee near Times Square, but the theater was packed, "and people were getting up on their seats and yelling, 'Yeah, kill him!"'
Back then, of course, both the avenging gunfire and the social commentary — in blatant exploitations like "The Exterminator," more mainstream action movies like the Dirty Harry sequel "Magnum Force" and gritty classics like "Taxi Driver" — were aimed at the lawlessness of cities like New York.
Now, with murder rates down and cities habitable again, both the on-screen violence and the sociopolitical references are as likely to be about the war in Iraq or the more generalized insecurity of a world on guard against terrorism.
"The Brave One," for example, echoes the revenge-speak of political leaders who vow to "waste the bad guys" and use taunts like "bring 'em on," and it lets a soul-searching character ask, "Hasn't the whole Iraqi debacle taught us anything?" This movie acknowledges that New York has become "the safest big city in the world" while making clear that plummeting crime rates provide little comfort to those who become the statistical anomalies.
Foster's character feels so secure in present-day Manhattan that she sees no danger in strolling, well past sunset, through the kind of pedestrian underpass in Central Park that two decades ago would have loomed as frightening to moviegoers as the Bates Motel. The brutal attack she barely survives, said the film's director, Jordan, is a reminder that in this age even a pristine city can be just one senseless act away from utter chaos.
"The reason I wanted to do it was because of the kind of nameless fears people in Western society have at the moment," Jordan said in a phone interview from Dublin. "If I was tapping into anything, I was tapping into that. I see a lot of films attempting to deal with the political situation — the Iraq war, or the post-9/11 sensibility — in terms of ways dealt with in the 1970s. And to me the paradigm doesn't work. And I think it's because people at the moment in the West are afraid of the very structure of their society falling to pieces. They're afraid, and they don't know why."
While Foster's character turns vigilante in "The Brave One" — albeit not as indiscriminately as the Bronson character in "Death Wish" — Kevin Bacon's mild-mannered father in "Death Sentence" takes aim only at those who have gone after his wife and sons.
Those bad guys are a gang of drug dealers who rampage and kill unimpeded. But Wan, the 30-year-old director of "Death Sentence," said he saw his evildoers as a metaphor for other things that are causing people to feel powerless to protect themselves.
"There's a lot of these wars we're fighting that we're not really sure why we're doing it, and family members are dying because of things overseas, and we all feel like we're losing control, in a way that we haven't been used to in a long time," Wan said in an interview at an out-of-the-way Beverly Hills hotel bar. "The '80s and '90s were times when we were complacent, when we took a lot of things for granted. And now that we see that things can be taken away so easily, I think deep down we want to take some of the control back."
Wan said he injected a dose of social relevance as a way of protecting himself. "I knew that in making a revenge movie, the critics out there would already be sharpening their weapons," he said. Suicide bombings in the news gave him his theme: the unending cycle of violence. Bacon, for his part, said that he signed up to star in "Death Sentence" because "I really wanted to just jump around and shoot some guns" but discovered that the film had unexpected depth.
"He answers violence with violence, it spins out of control, and he can't stop it," he said of his character, who undergoes a Travis Bickle-like metamorphosis from businessman to revenge killer, complete with a self-administered Mohawk, but falls well short of achieving satisfaction.
"One aspect that James and I were very specific about was, yeah, we have a movie that's an action movie, a genre-thriller-action movie," Bacon said. "But at the end you don't see the hero step out into the sunlight and the music swells and he's triumphed. He really is broken. Everything he cares about he has destroyed by picking up a sword."
Intriguingly, "Death Sentence" places Bacon's family in an idyllic suburb just a short drive from a hellish urban no man's land. The movie was shot in Columbia, S.C., of all places, and Wan said it took considerable set-dressing to create a convincingly grungy ghetto.
But one of Wan's producers, Ashok Amritraj, said that the proximity of serene suburb to violent badlands required no suspension of disbelief. Amritraj, whose Hyde Park Entertainment is also developing the "Star Chamber" remake, said that falling national crime statistics ignored the many places — whether in cities like Newark, N.J., or the suburban and rural areas where gangs have spread — that violent crime still has the capacity to terrorize.
That nearness to danger stems less from an inept justice system, he said, than from the social polarization that's continuing unabated, not only in the United States but also worldwide.
"The rich are getting richer, while at the same time the way cities are these days, you're just two miles away from a possible slum or gangbangers," Amritraj said. "It's not like Beverly Hills is impenetrable. One mile away you run into a problem, and your life has changed."