Kevin Bacon’s (Where the Truth Lies, Beauty Shop) got one of each -- scythe and machete -- in his garage in Death Sentence. He’s a white-shirt-wearing, window-office-occupying corporate cog at an insurance company. Surely the biggest danger he is in would be from, you know, paper cuts on the risk-analysis reports he handles on a daily basis. Right? How did he know to have such deadly tools at the ready?

But wait! Bacon’s Nick Hume lives in a world that’s a right-wing wet dream, one in which anarchic, immoral “animals” run amuck in the streets; cities are destitute, rundown hellholes of lawlessness; and the cops, when you ask them for assistance, tell you, “God help you.” Seriously, that happens here. I was waiting for the cop to tell Kevin, “Vaya con dios,” in that way that means, “You crazy bastard, what are you thinking, expecting civilization in this cesspit?” like he was in some badass old-fashioned Western. Cuz he is. Except this is, you know, Cleveland, or somewhere. I mean, what is this: Baghdad under American occupation? Or is it America America, where decent upstanding white folk are preyed upon by the scum of the earth?

Yeah, it’s the latter. And the only way for a decent upstanding white man to get justice is to take matters into his own hands. Cuz not only are the cops useless, the criminal justice system is a joke, too, as Nick learns, to his prissy little-girl horror, when his golden-boy teenage son Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) is killed by “an animal” during a robbery that isn’t a robbery but a gang “initiation.” Because our ungovernable cities are overrun -- overrun, I tell you -- by gangbangers out to slaughter nice upstanding folk for no reason but thrills.

And that’s a good thing, because it leaves room for a man to be a man, not some pissy cubicle drone. Give him some guns, and let him run amuck, righteously, on the garbage-strewn, scumbag-infested streets of America -- this situation is, presumably, the fault of teh libruls, but hey: it allows for some way-cool revenge, so it’s okay. So what if the deck has to be ridiculously stacked against poor Nick and his nice family. This is reality, man... or at least reality as it should be, so that real manly men could put things to right, so that reality would be a little closer to nice. Like... the way... it kinda is... now...

Hmmm. Look, it’s not as if the world were perfect, but it’s nowhere near the Mad Max apocalypse Death Sentence would have us think it is. Why must it create caricatures of criminals and of our criminal justice system to make whatever point it’s trying to make? Why does it think it’s serious drama when it’s actually something closer to a parody of Charles Bronson movies? (The film in based, in fact, on the novel of the same name by Brian Garfield, who also wrote Death Wish, upon which the Bronson movie was based.) Did director James Wan (Saw) think it was enough to throw a sickly gray-green tinge on everything, and that that would make us go weak in the knees for a Man(TM) to save us from ourselves?

Kevin Bacon wipes up some of his own blood -- oozing from a wound acquired when he went after his son’s killer -- with one of those very risk-analysis reports he’s been devoting his attention on, and then you get it. Okay: real men don’t waste time on risk analysis, they just blow shotgun holes in bad guys big enough to, well, drive idiotic plots through. So what if Death Sentence is that perfect storm of moviemaking, a film consisting entirely of false notes, a film that thinks it’s complex and smart but is really simple and stupid? Real men don’t worry about not being preposterous. They just worry about shotgun caliber.

(Technorati tags: Death Sentence, Kevin Bacon, James Wan)