'Death Sentence:' Cruel, if not unusual, punishment

Except for one scene--a chase through alleys and various hallways that ends with some clever scenes in a parking garage--James Wan's "Death Sentence" is just that, a cruel punishment but what you might expect from the director of "Saw."

Kevin Bacon is Nick Hume, the ultimate family man with a lovely and loving wife, Helen (Kelly Preston), and two teen-aged sons, Brendan (Stuart Lafferty) and Lucas (Jordan Garrett), neither of whom seem to have a friend outside of mom and dad. All things seem just about Ozzie and Harriet perfect except for the feeling that, perhaps, dad prefers his hockey-playing older son Brendan over his brother.

One evening, on their way home from a hockey game in which Brendan scored the winning goal (natch), they make the mistake of stopping in a gas station in the wrong side of town which is about to be the target of a gang of toughs, one of whom must kill someone with a machete in order to get initiated into the gang. Brendan becomes the unlucky victim, but not before dad jumps the assailant, manages to take off his ski mask and watches as the killer is struck, but not killed, by a passing vehicle.

Then the movie moves to a couple of scenes that made me realize it really didn't know where it wanted to go, or, if it did, how to get there easily. Dad discovers that his son's killer is probably going to get off with a light sentence so Nick refuses to testify against the kid, allowing the killer to go free. Why would he do this? The natural answer would be so that he could, as the cliche goes, "take the law into his own hands." The problem here is that he really doesn't do that. He seeks out the kid, sure, and Nick does dispatch him, but the killing seems sort of accidental and, well, incidental.

The problem is that the kid's gang doesn't think it's that accidental. Led by Billy Darley (Garrett Hedlund), they ambush Nick as he leaves work the next day, setting off the chase scene I described earlier.

But then the movie goes downhill very quickly. Faster than you can say "six degrees of separation," Nick does transform into this vengeful hunter/avenging angel leading to a climax in an abandoned mental hospital lifted directly from "Taxi Driver."

The film was adapted from a 1975 novel by Brian Garfield, who wrote it as a sequel to his "Death Wish," which, the year before, was a popular film with a similar theme that starred Charles Bronson as the avenger. "Death Wish," however, made the city of New York the real villain so it tapped into fears that could haunt many an inner city dweller. "Death Sentence," on the other hand, is too specific to engage the viewer and exists more in a nightmare than an actual place. (Turns out it was filmed in Columbia, S.C., not my idea of urban hell.)

Grade: F