We're back again with the continuing saga of the world's unluckiest man, architect turned vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson). After his return to New York in Death Wish 3 culminated in him wiping out the head of another gang of multicultural street punks (along with the wall of an apartment building) with a missile launcher (fired from inside the apartment!), he's somehow free from imprisonment and back in Los Angeles working as an architect. In the two years since his Brooklyn gang war throwdown, he's settled down with a new girlfriend, investigative journalist Karen Sheldon (Kay Lenz), and her teenage daughter Erica (National Lampoon's Vacation's Dana Barron), who wants to be an architect and has submitted some sketches and drawings to Paul's firm that meet with Paul's approval. This kid is going places. Unfortunately, since Paul Kersey is in her life, those places are the morgue.
Erica is a sweet kid, but she and her boyfriend have been experimenting with drugs, to Kersey's quiet disapproval. The guy's murdered at least 80 people by this point, but he's no fan of puffin' tuff. Sadly, Erica's not just hitting that sticky icky. The sinsemilla is a gateway to the white stuff. The powder. C-c-c-c-c-cocaine! After they hit up their dealers for some weed at a quintessential '80s arcade the pushers use as a base of operations, one of the dealers gives Erica a free bag of coke, just as the '80s authority figures prophesized in their Just Say No propaganda. Dealers giving away expensive drugs, shake my damn head. Because the accidental angel of death Paul Kersey is a father figure to Erica, she dies of an overdose upon her first taste of the coke.
Kersey follows Erica's boyfriend back to the arcade after the funeral and watches him confront one of the dealers. They take the argument to the parking lot near the bumper cars, where the young man stupidly and repeatedly announces his plans to go to the cops. The dealer knifes the kid, but Kersey takes out the trash Death Wish-style. A hilarious punk rocker with a distinctive Valley accent played by Mark Pellegrino (who had small but memorable roles in The Big Lebowski and Mulholland Drive) gives his eyewitness account to Detectives Reiner (Blue Velvet's George Dickerson) and Nozaki (Soon-Tek Oh). (When pressed to come up with the full license plate number after he's only able to remember the last three digits: "Hey, I ain't a fuckin' detective. You are.") Our detectives think his description sounds an awful lot like suspected '70s and early '80s vigilante Paul Kersey. Somehow, no one has heard about the multi-block full-scale Brooklyn gang war of two years earlier, even though roughly 18 gangs and a missile launcher were involved and several buildings exploded, but this is LA, baby. Let New York handle New York.
After the bumper car blasteroo, Kersey gets a blackmail-threatening phone call from a mysterious wealthy stranger, newspaper magnate Nathan White (cult movie legend John P. Ryan), who knows all about his vigilante past. A limo is already waiting to take Kersey to White's mansion. White says his daughter died of a cocaine overdose, and he's ready to destroy the Los Angeles drug trade in revenge. He'll pay Kersey to use his murderin' skills to take out the two major drug suppliers in the city, Ed Zacharias (Perry Lopez) and the Morello family and as many of their henchmen as is necessary. (One of Zacharias' henchmen is a pre-fame Danny Trejo.)
White has a dossier on Zacharias, the Morellos, and all their employees and gives Kersey some colorful descriptions. My favorite is his assessment of Frank Bauggs (David Fonteno), one of the Morellos' top guys: "He's a trained baritone and an upwardly mobile super-achiever." If you're thinking Nathan White and his bizarrely indeterminate accent, eyebrows, and wig have ulterior motives and maybe aren't what they seem, then you may be a sentient being, which is more than we can say for half the American voters.
Kersey takes two days to think it over, decides against it, and the movie ends. Just kidding. He of course says yes and starts blasting away as well as pitching the crime organizations against each other, Yojimbo-style. While all this is happening, Karen decides to turn her grief at losing her daughter into a series of articles about the local drug trade and its human cost for the newspaper she writes for, at which point the movie completely forgets about her until the concluding scenes.
What follows is a series of exciting, hilarious, stupid, and, dare I say, underrated Death Wish moments taking place in such cinematically satisfying locations as the aforementioned video game arcade, bumper car ride, luxury condo, drug dealer mansion poolside birthday party, spooky parking garage, oilfield, fish processing factory/drug front (with guards Mitch Pileggi and "Judo" Gene LeBell), video store (with standees of Leatherface and Harrison Ford promoting new releases The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 and Witness) and an absolutely hoppin' roller rink, and weapons including an array of guns, an exploding wine bottle (hilariously, two of the characters' dummies are left onscreen a few seconds too long before the explosion), a damn grenade launcher, and the classic but deadly hands and feet of Chuck Bronson.
Yes, some of this feels more like the usual lone badass vs. organized crime '80s action movie landscape than a Death Wish movie, but all of it is pretty damn enjoyable. This fourth film has less of a cult following than its predecessors (especially the bonkers third installment), but it honestly may be tied with the third one as my favorite. (Almost everyone agrees that the fifth and final film in the franchise sucks, including Bronson.) It's less of a right-wing fantasy than the others, with the "drug pushers are killing our kids" moral panic mostly just a pretext for a bunch of kickass action sequences, and it dispenses with the rape obsessions of the Michael Winner-directed first three. There is an attempted rape scene at the very beginning, but it's part of a dream sequence that parodies the first three films and lets us know this one is going to be a little different.
Winner and Bronson were on the outs at this point, and veteran Hollywood filmmaker J. Lee Thompson took over. Thompson directed his first film in 1950 and was a few years away from retirement when he made Death Wish 4, though he worked at a prolific pace all the way through the '80s (mostly with Bronson) and may have directed more movies '80s American kids watched with their dads, uncles, or classmates than any other filmmaker on earth. Any time groups of dudes were sitting around a TV watching a movie between 1982 and 1992 in the United States, there was a one in twelve chance they were watching a Thompson movie (I made up this statistic but I stand by it.)
Thompson is a better technical filmmaker than the rough and ready Michael Winner, which has its pros and cons. His Death Wish movie has a smoother construction, more graceful camera movements (weren't expecting the word "graceful" in a Death Wish review, were ya?), and some impressive shot compositions. It's the best-looking movie in the franchise. Winner is better at the raw stuff and the gritty grindhouse scuzz, which is missed here ("hey man, where's my scuzz?"), but he compensates by creating some truly nutso action sequences and packing every frame of this thing with character actors, weird-looking dudes, and weird-looking character actors. I also love that a bumper sticker on a drug dealer's van reads "I ❤️ New Wave." Modern filmmakers tend to leave out these absurd little details that give a movie so much life.
