Death Sentence (2007)

Death Sentence (2007)

6/10

Starring

Kevin Bacon

Kelly Preston

Directed by James Wan

When Death Sentence starts with a heavy focus on family pictures and the family itself, you can guess the movie is going to lean towards someone in the family going crazy because of something happening to one of them.

The movie, for me, had many holes, and to add to that, it had this high sense of unreality—where a man can flip from wearing a suit to becoming a killer. The reality the movie decided to paint may not be true-to-life, but it was a fun one.

The writers jumped in with a lot of family love being thrown around, almost making you want to turn off the TV. They moved from there into a murder, and then they decided to skip what you’d usually see in most movies: the prep. Every action movie plot always has a prep—except this one.

Here’s how things went from the start. After the whole overly sentimental family love bit, one member of the family gets killed. The husband/father (Kevin Bacon), who witnessed the incident, decides not to give a statement and lets the accused go free. This is where you’d expect a prep—but there isn’t one. He doesn’t bother to try and understand the accused’s ways or even learn about his gang. Instead, he goes home, picks up a weapon without thinking, and goes after the accused. He kills the accused and returns home.

It doesn’t take long before the rest of the gang figures out who did it, and within the next few minutes of the movie, he’s being chased down the street by the gang members of the man he killed. At this point, you’d think the man’s situation is going to go from bad to worse—but just how worse it gets, you’ll have to watch and see.

The writers threw reality out the window and turned our lead into some sort of killer on the loose, determined to take down a gang. Now, you and I both know it’s impossible for someone with a military background to go after a gang single-handedly, let alone someone with no killing or military experience.

How such situations end is never good, and this movie leaves you guessing how things are going to turn out in the end.

I’d recommend this movie, but only for action junkies—not for anyone hoping to see a well-composed and rounded movie, so in the end I will say, it is worth watching.