Death Kiss is a 2018 thriller about a vigilante with a mysterious past who goes to a crime-infested city and takes the law into his own hands, at the same time protecting a young mother and her child.
It’s nearly impossible to even casually give writer/director Rene Perez‘s latest vigilante flick a glance without reeling back with a whole lot of WTF? I suppose that only counts for anyone with a passing knowledge of classic Hollywood films of the 60, 70s and 80s, but when you look at this movie’s poster or watch its trailer, you can’t help but wonder if the producers someone how made a pact with black magic and were able to reanimate the dead. Charles Bronson is back people and he’s starring in a new movie.
Obviously, that last sentence isn’t quite right. Bronson, who passed away in 2003, is not technically back, but his spirit lives on in the body and face of actor Robert Bronzi, who looks like he was poured from a mold of the late actor. Here, he plays ‘The Stranger,’ an unnervingly close doppelganger of Bronson’s Paul Kersey from his long-running Death Wish franchise. He roams the dark city like a shadowed monster, seemingly randomly targeting sex traffickers, drug dealers and assorted low-lifes, barely speaking a word before loading them up with lots of hot lead. Meanwhile, from afar, he takes their cash and stuffs it into the mailbox of a young woman (Eva Hamilton) and her handicapped daughter. Why?
The recent big budget remake of the original Death Wish with Bruce Willis failed to really capture the gutsy, controversial presence of the first, soaking the screen in gobs of gory blood, and for tagging a missed opportunity like nearly no other, it seems a shame that film didn’t cast Bronzi instead of Willis. Still, it’s not like Perez is working all that hard to elevate the genre anyway, his filmography a collection of low-budget splatter shots that earn critic scores you could count on two fingers. Here, he maintains the norm, splashing Death Kiss in buckets of spurting crimson (refreshingly practical and not CGI) in a recycled plot of uninspired vengeance that ceaselessly tracks The Stranger on his quest to clean up the streets. Yet it’s clearly his best work to date, if that counts for anything.
Injected between these showdowns is Dan Forthright (Daniel Baldwin), a radio talk show host who prattles on about the fallacy of police protection, where he gets pulled over for a traffic ticket while the house down the road sells cocaine off the front porch, and how the media spends too much time on racism and no time on the sexual slavery of eleven-year-old girls. Unfortunately, as way to justify The Stranger’s bloodlust, it comes off forced. Either way, the real problem is that Death Kiss only slaps on these superficial threads of social commentary without any weight. There’s absolutely zero investment on our part in understanding any of the movie’s motivations. Yes, The Stranger get some much-needed history as to why he does what he does, but it comes at the wrong time, and by then, we simply don’t care that much.
Perhaps if the film had been better made, with less attention to the buffoonery and more in the characters themselves, this might have had more bite. It’s tonally awkward, with nearly no momentum, thrusting us into the sterile violence from frame one, accompanied by a terribly lackluster score that makes a few attempts at striking nostalgia but has no punch. While Bronzi is one heck of convincing visual Bronson, he lacks everything else that made that legendary actor so memorable. And so does this film is trying to harken back to one of his more iconic movies. For fans of ultra low budget shooters only.