Death Sentence

Death Sentence casts Kevin Bacon as Nick Hume, a mild-mannered family man whose eldest son (Stuart Lafferty’s Brendan) is brutally murdered during a gas station robbery. After learning that the perpetrator will likely get off with a light sentence, Nick decides to take matters into his own hands and subsequently embarks on a campaign of revenge against each of the gang members responsible. Director James Wan – working from Ian Jeffers’ screenplay – has infused Death Sentence with a distinctly over-the-top sensibility that generally feels at odds with Bacon’s low-key and sporadically powerful performance; the filmmaker is clearly going for the vibe of a larger-than-life revenge movie, complete with appreciatively brutal bursts of violence, ensuring that Bacon’s efforts to bring depth to the proceedings are essentially rendered moot. And while there’s certainly no denying the effectiveness of some of these sequences – particularly a pursuit that eventually winds up in a parking garage – the film’s schizophrenic nature eventually proves to be its downfall (that increasingly silly and preposterous trajectory of the storyline only cements this feeling). That said, Death Sentence is generally entertaining enough to warrant a mild recommendation – particularly for those with a natural predilection for movies of this ilk (ie revenge movies).

**1/2 out of ****