This Movie Is About: the perfect family. Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) has the perfect family. He has the beautiful wife, Helen Hume (Kelly Preston) and the two perfect boys, Brendan and Billy. Brenden is also the golden boy of the family who is the perfect son and the perfect athlete who plays on the first line on his hockey team. He also has a chance to make it pro after a string of great games. He wants to go to Canada for university and maybe a shot at the pros. That is when he and his father decide to pull up at a broken down gas station. A group of gang bangers walk in with ski masks and pulls a shot gun on the owner and blasts the shit out of him before turning their gun on Brendan. Nick can't get in there fast enough before a kid slashes Brendan's throat and runs out of the gas station only to get hit by a car. Brendan dies and Nick's perfect family is torn apart. Things go from bad to worse when Nick's lawyer tells him that they can't get this guy jail time more than 5 years because there were no witnesses. Nick doesn't testify in court and the guy just walks out of there scott-free. But you just wait, my friend. Nick has other ideas for him to pay, but in doing so will have to pay his own price, for going into the dark side.
You Should Watch This Because: it's like The Punisher if it was more hardcore and more serious. Now that movie was pretty serious but this one is off the charts as the feel of it was great. A single man up against a force that's just brutal but he's doing it for a reason we can all understand even though we might not necessarily do the same thing. The action is pretty none stop and it's messy which is great. Nick is not the hero that we all want to be. In fact, there is so many things wrong with him we're surprised that more shit hasn't happened to him. But that's when all that shit does happen to him and it just makes it that much greater. If you like the gritty, dark grim movies, then this movie is one that you don't want to miss.
What's Hot: These movies are cheesy because the situation is usually very serious but the characters and what they do to get their revenge is just stupid. That's where this movie dodges a bullet. They take it very seriously and goes through all the right steps in making sure that they're doing all the things that a real person would do. This includes getting the police involved with the introduction of Detective Wallis (Aisha Tyler) and she does all the police stuff that's supposed to be taken care of in these films. One of the other great things about this film is the primal natural of it. It's so raw and crude that it will definitely appeal to an audience that likes that style. The graphics and effects are very Sawesque which is great if you liked the way that movie was shot.
What's Not Hot: Unfortunately this film doesn't go out of that stereotypical genre that gets plagued by bad reviews because it's just not new and the same thing has been done before and it's just not that interesting anymore. This one does change it up a bit by making it a bit more grim but really it's something we've all seen before. The biggest problems were with the ending and the antagonist. The antagonist is the leader of the gang, Billy Darley (Garrett Hedlund) who is just a straight up bad guy with a father complex. It never goes beyond all of that and although we understand why he's doing what he's doing through out the film, we don't know anything else about him. This made him just a reactive antagonist and not that interesting as opposed to an antagonist that always has a plan or has something planned out or believes that he/she is doing something great. The ending is just stupid. I'm sorry, but it was going pretty good despite all the one dimensional characters and then the end came and it was just not deserved. I won't say too much about it because it is the ending but I just felt like it went against what he has been doing and he really deserve what he got.
Last Comments: Death Sentence does a great job in creating a situation that is believable for us to watch them get killed and go through this journey with a character. Although the characters are shallow and there is really no other layers to them, the action is very well done and everything comes together nicely enough that we can have fun watching this movie while not expecting too much from it. It might seem like it's selling this movie short but it's really not. Because by the end of it it's all about having fun anyways and this movie delivers on that front and that is the most important thing.
Breaking It Down:
Story: 6.5 (Brian Garfield: novel, Ian Jeffers: screenplay)
Direction: 8.0 (James Wan)
Acting: 7.8
Cinematography: 8.2
Music/Sound: 5.5
Entertainment Value: 7.0 (not an average)
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