DEATH WISH 3

Death Wish 3 may well be Michael Winner's seminal work, finally breaking free of the chains of logic or narrative that had confined his earlier work to explode in an orgy of wildly improbable violence where he stages World War Three in a New York neighborhood besieged by gangs, with the combatants assorted street punks and elderly, mostly nice Jewish couples.'Those kids never stood a chance... Ed Lauter's disillusioned cop having first wrongly arrested Charles Bronson's vigilante for the murder of one of the few people in the film he doesn't kill, has him beaten up and thrown in the tank, then decides to set him loose on a problem neighborhood. Charlie fits right in with the assorted senior citizens who make up the put-upon locals, and it's not long before he's rigging booby traps in their houses to maim or disfigure would-be home invaders, shooting bag snatchers in the back or interrupting dinner with Mr and Mrs Kaprov to kill a couple of punks trying to steal his car stereo before returning to finish off the meal of delicious cabbage soup. None of which pleases Gavan O'Herlihy's local gang leader who sports an interesting anti-Mohican hairstyle and it's not long before far more locals are meeting horrible deaths than when the gangs had a free hand before Charlie moved in. With Bronson's character having run out of relatives to be killed off to inspire another rampage in the last movie and his old army buddy killed off early in the picture obviously deemed not enough motivation for him to unleash hell, Deborah Raffin's lawyer with the hots for Charlie draws the short straw and ends up in a crash in one of those extremely inflammable cars that only need the slightest fender bender to explode. So it's out with the Lewis machineguns and rocket launcher while O'Herlihy is on the phone to rentamob to get reinforcements (literally: he just picks up a phone and says "I need more guys.'Yeah, thanks," and they arrive). Filmed mostly in London's WWII Blitz areas for extra surrealism, this is by far the best of the Death Wish films. But it's that last half hour that elevates the film. The finale abandons any notion of realism to rack up the largest possible body count: cops die by the score, buildings burn and Bronson's enthusiastic taking out the trash inspires the neighbourhood to come together in a merciless killing spree of their own. Even though another two Death Wish movies followed, this was the end of Bronson and Winner's association.