Death Wish 4: the Crackdown (1987)
MGM DVD (region 1)
d. J. Lee Thompson; pr. Pancho Kohner; scr. Gail Morgan Hickman; ph. Gideon Porath; m. John Bisharat, Paul McCallum, Valentine McCallum; ed. Peter Lee-Thompson; cast. Charles Bronson, Kay Lenz, John P. Ryan, Perry Lopez, George Dickerson, Soon-Tek Oh (99 mins)
In the mid 1970s, Charles Bronson had finally become as big a star in the USA as he was already in Europe. The film which cemented his super-stardom in the US was Death Wish, the tale of an architect who becomes a vigilante killer after his family is brutally assaulted by a gang of street hoodlums. The film was immediately controversial for its reactionary right-wing fantasy of justice and proved a major box-office hit. Winner and Bronson followed it up some years later with both Death Wish 2 and Death Wish 3, the films which brought the series into violent and exploitative caricature. With Death Wish 2, Bronson began an association with producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, whose production house Cannon Films was beginning to put out a series of violent, lurid and wholly disreputable thrillers. Amongst the studio’s in-house directors was one J. Lee Thompson who had already worked with Bronson in the late 1970s on three offbeat film ventures – St. Ives, The White Buffalo and Caboblanco. It was Thompson who leapt onto the prospect of working with Bronson at Cannon and the two of them would make a number of violent thrillers which traded on Bronson’s vigilante image for a look at a malfunctioning Patriarchal authority. It was perhaps inevitable that this oeuvre intersect the Death Wish franchise and such would happen when Thompson made Death Wish 4: the Crackdown from a script by Gail Morgan Hickman.
Death Wish 4 follows the further exploits of architect Paul Kersey (Bronson), a man who leads a double life as a vigilante killer, always in search of petty violent lawbreakers to crush in his own harsh and judgmental manner. In his vendetta against the irredeemable members of society’s outskirts, Bronson here runs up against the organized drug trade. Bronson is dating a journalist (Kay Lenz) whose daughter dies of a drug overdose. Bronson investigates further and uncovers a network of adult drug pushers preying on teenagers. He kills one of them, a crime which two investigating policemen soon begin to tie in to the previous spate of killings by “the vigilante”. Bronson is contacted by an older rich man who claims his daughter was likewise a drug victim and who now wants to enact vengeance against the two rival drug lords controlling narcotics distribution in the city. The man gives Bronson enough information and weapons for Bronson to infiltrate one such drug gang. This he does and learns enough about the rivalry between the two gangs to initiate a feud between them. The rival drug lords are set to kill each other when one of them is told by a corrupt policeman that it is not a drug related incident but a personal vendetta. The corrupt policeman knows that Bronson is the vigilante and is involved and sets out to kill him. When Bronson acts in self-defense he must face the wrath of the corrupt cop’s decent partner. read more