The sequel Roger Ebert refused to give a star rating: “Artistically inept and morally repugnant”
There aren’t many Hollywood franchises to have avoided the law of diminishing returns, meaning that nobody’s really surprised when a sequel turns out to be inferior to its predecessor. However, Roger Ebert was left so affronted by one follow-up that he simply refused to award it a rating on his favoured star system.
Cinema history has been littered with shoddy sequels for decades, ever since studio bigwigs realised one of the easiest ways to shift tickets and make money was through repeat business. While there’s a graveyard littered with the bones of failed franchises that tried to run before they’d learned how to walk, the series that left a bad taste in Ebert’s mouth spanned five features and a remake.
A product of its time, the granite-faced Charles Bronson teamed up with Michael Winner to adapt Brian Garfield’s novel Death Wish for the silver screen, which wasn’t without its controversies. Whereas the source material denounced the idea of vigilantism, the film embraced it by turning the leading man’s vengeful Paul Kersey into an antihero of sorts, one who audiences fully embraced.
The 1974 original recouped its production budget almost ten times over at the box office in the United States despite its brutality and encouragement of street-level justice being condemned in many corners. It was eight years before Bronson and Winner reunited for Death Wish II, and Ebert really wished they hadn’t.
Prefacing his review with an explanation, the critic opined that some pictures are simply too horrid to warrant a star, and this one was among that number. “I award no stars only to movies that are artistically inept and morally repugnant,” he wrote. “So, Death Wish II joins such unsavoury company as Penitentiary II, and I Spit on Your Grave. And that, in a way, is a shame.”
Ebert noted that he admired Bronson for his “lean, quiet, and efficient” persona, but he had to draw the line somewhere. He didn’t have any issues with the first Death Wish either, praising how Winner helmed the opener with a “nice, slick polish” to create an “effective movie” that worked fine for what it was.
That said, in his own words, “Death Wish II is a disaster by comparison.” Bronson’s first outing as Kersey at least provided a reason for him to take matters into his own hands and track down the culprits who murdered his wife and assaulted his daughter, but “this one is just a series of senseless killings.”
“What’s most shocking about Death Wish II is the lack of artistry and skill in the filmmaking,” Ebert offered. “The movie is underwritten and desperately underplotted so that its witless action scenes alternate with lobotomized dialogue passages. The movie doesn’t contain an ounce of life. It slinks onto the screen and squirms for a while, and is over.”
Needless to say, he wasn’t a fan. It made almost as much money from theatres as Death Wish to underline the original’s staying power, but Ebert’s savage reaction wasn’t the only one to denounce it as a vastly inferior film.
