Death Sentence

The early fall movie season is the elephant graveyard where flicks not appealing enough to be summer blockbusters or artsy enough to be winter Oscar-contenders go to die a quiet death. The biggest, smelliest carcass in this year's graveyard is Death Sentence.

Sentence, directed by Saw-helmer James Wan, features Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) as a father bent on avenging the murder of his son. A victim of a gang-initiation ritual, Hume's son was the golden boy-an all-star hockey player with his eyes on the big time. Predictably, risk analyst Hume has another son who is dark, angsty and suffers it-should-have-been-me syndrome after the death of his elder brother.

What follows is a bloodbath, as Hume tracks down and murders every hoodlum involved in his son's death. In retaliation the gang leader gives Hume a death sentence-get it?-and from there the movie accelerates to an ultimately disappointing climax.

To be quite honest, Death Sentence is not a bad action movie. In fact it is a pretty great one. The scene where Bacon battles generic thug #12 in a moving car as it slowly crawls toward the edge of a parking garage is one of the more memorable sequences in recent movie history.

The only problem is that it pretends to be a drama/thriller. Wan's detailed and brutally realistic fight scenes will easily make him the man to direct Die Hard 5 or Indian Jones 15-maybe even Rocky 78, where the Italian Stallion will face-off against the reanimated corpse of Mussolini.

With all the bullets and bloodshed, the movie is very reminiscent of The Departed. However, while every death in Scorsese's Oscar winner was poignant and important, Death Sentence's large tally of corpses seems meaningless and empty by comparison.

There is no lesson, there is no moral, there is nothing positive to be gained. The only thing audiences are left with is the numbness of too-much violence and not enough redemption.