There are two ways to go if you're filming a revenge fantasy these days.

There's the slather-on-the-cheese Death Wish approach, where the bad guys hurt or kill the hero's loved ones in the first act, unleashing the dogs of war while you've barely touched your popcorn.

Then there's the more serious-minded In The Bedroom approach, where the revenge is almost incidental to hours of agonizing over the morality of violence and vigilante justice.

Considering that Death Sentence -- "From the director of Saw!" -- is actually taken from a self-derivative novel by Death Wish author Brian Garfield, the movie seems surprisingly In The Bedroom-ish for a time.

But rest assured, there comes that inadvertently hilarious moment when our hero Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) finally gets that cold-eyed look that would freeze Rambo's blood, and makes the leap from suit-wearing desk jockey to killing machine.

If the build-up is meant to make it more believable that tragedy could turn a rich insurance exec into the Terminator, they're wasting their time and yours. There is simply no way to make a Death Wish-retread like Death Sentence believable.

If there was, it would happen in real life, and brokers would be striding up and down Bay St. looking to take out the trash. It would be preferable to accept that you're making a ridiculous genre film, and get down to business.

In Death Sentence, we start out following in montage the growing-up process of Nick's kids Joe (Jordan Garrett) and Brendan (Stuart Lafferty), the latter of whom is a hockey prodigy who's headed to the NHL via "college in Canada" (huh?). A few more domestic scenes later, a fateful robbery of a gas station leaves Nick bereft, and facing his son's killer in court.

Faced with the reality of a plea bargain, Nick inexplicably and instantly becomes a hostile witness and deliberately allows the killer to walk (obviously with ulterior motives).

Unlike Death Wish, where the retaliation was all one-way, Death Sentence is a study in retaliation between Hume and the generic, mostly white gang headed by a not particularly scary-looking guy named Billy (Garrett Hedlund) who sports Vin Diesel-style Triple-X neck tattoos.

Shaking with fear, Nick still manages his first vigilante kill, which starts the ball rolling between him and Billy. After each encounter, Nick comes home scuffed up and dirty, giving cause for vague worry for his clueless wife (Kelly Preston).

Not so clueless is the police detective (Aisha Tyler) who figures out early that Nick is in over his head ("So, did you make war with the wrong dawg?" she says, in an example of the movie's laughable 'street' dialogue).

James Wan (Saw) proves he knows his way around a shoot-out, even if the movie falls a few miles short of doing justice to the serious themes (retaliation, due process, justice, war) it throws ham-handedly up the flagpole. John Goodman gives a cool performance as a greasy chop-shop operator in a three-scene performance that hovers way above the movie.

Otherwise, the only thing really worth seeing is Bacon's engine-of-destruction turn in Death Sentence's last half hour -- an over-the-top last act in which the only way you can tell the good guys from the bad guys is by their aim.

(This film is rated 18-A)
More Movie Reviews