Movie Review: A 'Sentence' that's punctuated with melodrama

"Death Sentence" takes the pulp revenge thriller to the edge. And then falls off.

Kevin Bacon plays Nick Hume, whose life is shattered when he's victimized by a sadistic street gang. The police can't protect his loved ones, so Nick opens up a giant 55-gallon drum of vengeance on the scum.

Does the plot seem wholly unoriginal? It should. This ambitious but seriously flawed throwback to the grungy world of mid-'70s vigilante dramas was inspired by the novel from Brian Garfield, whose "Death Wish" established the genre and launched five Charles Bronson films. Director James Wan, whose shamelessly exploitative "Saw" raised the stakes on titillating violence, seems to have made the film as an act of contrition. He strains -- melodramatically, pretentiously, but sincerely -- to show a cycle of violence and retribution that destroys everything it touches. Inept passages aside, he appears to be trying to make a meaningful film, so A for effort. As for the execution, not so good.

It opens promisingly enough. Nick, his wife and adolescent sons frolic on home videos that show their warm bond without sentimentality. Nick's a good dad, but more involved with his older boy Brendan, a hockey star, than the introverted Lucas. There's a credible level of sibling strife between the kids that sets a realistic context for the story. Nick's office life rings true, too, with Bacon playing a quietly controlling man at ease in the executive suite.

When Nick finds himself detoured to a gas station on the wrong side of the tracks, however, "Death Sentence" becomes theatrical and false. The bad part of Nick's town is a lurid netherworld of exaggerated scumminess where psychotic punk gangs rule like packs of feral dogs. Most rabid is Billy Darley (an intense Garrett Hedlund), whose boys are out for a night of wilding that traumatizes Nick and his kin. Nick's trip through the courts embitters him further. "You picked the only gas station in North America without surveillance video," the prosecutor shrugs. If justice is to be done, there's only one man to deliver it.

Wan's action sequences are exciting enough initially, but as they become the film's main focus, they drift into dreary overkill. Nick acquires an arsenal from a cynical backstreet gun dealer (John Goodman, sweating like a rancid pork chop), and the film proceeds to overblown shootouts that would make a slaughterhouse documentary look anemic. The climax, with the mortally wounded Nick blasting his way into the gang's lair kamikaze-style, looks awkward and foolish.

The film is at its best in smaller character moments, when Billy and his hoodlum pals sneer at Nick's easy lifestyle, or when Nick sees too late that his righteous crusade can only end in disaster. Bacon worked on thematically similar anti-vigilante material to much better effect in "Mystic River." Maybe it's no accident that his character carries the surname of David Hume, the Scottish philosopher who wrote, "The corruption of the best things gives rise to the worst." True of morals, true of movies.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186