Decided on whatever whim I was having late last night to check out Eli Roth's contentious 2018 remake of Michael's Winner's 1974 revenge thriller DEATH WISH. I didn't hate it but it is certainly a pointless remake that amps up the violence porn but completely dumbs down just about everything else. Bruce Willis has been a great action hero over the years but he is somnambulistic here as Paul Kersey, taking over the role made iconic by Charles Bronson in the original and subsequent films. It's hard to buy Willis as a supposed brilliant surgeon, I think they changed his profession from the original architect purely for plot convenience (ie - to provide the excuse for a drawn-out scene where Kersey uses his medical knowledge to inflict painful torture on a crim to get information out of him, a scene reminiscent of a much more effective one involving Dustin Hoffman's tooth in MARATHON MAN).
