Bruce Willis’ New ‘Death Wish’ Trailer Blasted As ‘Alt-Right’ And ‘Racist’ [Video]
Acclaimed director Eli Roth is remaking the hit 1974 film Death Wish, and the 2017 version stars action flick alumni Bruce Willis as Dr. Paul Kersey, the film’s lead. The official trailer for the Death Wish remake just dropped this week, and it apparently left a bunch of folks with a collective bad taste in their mouths. Since it was released on Thursday, social media has been bombarded by amateur critics calling out Bruce Willis, Eli Roth, and the movie alike.
Many who have seen the trailer are calling Death Wish “alt-right fan fiction” and “racist.” Alan Ziberman even took to Twitter to scathingly comment that the Bruce Willis remake is so “nakedly fascist” that its alt-right fan-base will end up with “an erection before the trailer ends.”
Slated for release on November 22, the Death Wish remake purportedly follows the plot of the original. As IMDb describes, the movie tells the story of Paul Kersey (played this time around by Willis), an avowed “bleeding Heart liberal living in New York City with his wife and daughter.” After coming back home from a vacation with his wife, he’s warned by a co-worker that the city’s crime rate is on the rise. Still, Kersey believes that the crime is a result of the cycle of poverty.
Paul Kersey’s world and paradigm quickly comes to an end, however, when his wife is murdered and his daughter raped in the family’s shared home. The police are unable to solve the horrific crimes. In the original Death Wish, Paul ends up on a business trip to Arizona, where he learns about the Wild West and vigilante justice. When he returns to the city, Kersey takes the law into his own hands, killing criminals left and right.
Bruce Willis’ 2017Death Wish role reportedly takes place in Chicago, not New York, but the premise is the same.
Via @eliroth | Legends. Director Eli Roth and Bruce Willis on the set of #DeathWishMovie. pic.twitter.com/gVBLj5oyF9
— Death Wish (@DeathWishMovie) August 2, 2017
As Fox News reports, social media users aren’t the only ones who have been highly critical of the remake, with GQ magazine referring to Death Wish as the “most tone-deaf film of the year.” According to columnist Joshua Rivera, the Bruce Willis rendition of the 1974 classic is nothing more than a “work of cowardice and opportunism, piggybacking off hard-right fear-mongering and a government that’s completely and utterly disingenuous.”
“In moving the setting [from New York] to Chicago, a city where gun violence is both well-documented and highly politicized, and setting the trailer to ‘Back in Black’, the remake tips its hand: 2017’s ‘Death Wish; comes off as a work of cowardice and opportunism, piggybacking off hard-right fear-mongering and a government that’s completely and utterly disingenuous in its rhetoric about violent crime when nationwide, crime rates.”
The 'Death Wish' remake is the white vigilante movie we really, really don't need https://t.co/pJ3bkrKGcW pic.twitter.com/H5kekDdFz2
— Splinter (@splinter_news) August 4, 2017
Salon called out the new Death Wish as being a promotion and “glamorization” of high-capacity weapons, specifically calling out the upcoming Willis movie for perpetuating a culture of “white men” using guns to take their version of revenge on society.
“The glamorization of high-capacity firearms is fundamentally troubling in an age where white men (and boys) use them again and again to take what they see as revenge on society.”
The Death Wish films: Guys get to masturbate to an explicit rape scene AND indulge in a racist revenge fantasy. Glad they're rebooting it.
— @Kriss_Lowrance on Instagram (@kriss_lowrance) August 3, 2017
https://twitter.com/LockleyBrad/status/893126824800210944
https://twitter.com/TeddyKGB/status/893401733937934336
While many, presumably on the left, have nothing good to say about the new, Bruce Willis-led version of Death Wish, not everybody is hating on the soon-to-be released film.
https://twitter.com/jennifermcfarl4/status/893160533330989056
https://twitter.com/bella_ragazza_1/status/893504068362149888
I'm laughing at all the people calling Death Wish fascist or racist. Vigilante Justice has been a Hollywood theme for decades.
— Corey Pentland (@Ozymander) August 3, 2017
Despite the public outcry and extensive social media drama, neither Bruce Willis, nor director Eli Roth have publicly responded to media requests for comment about the upcoming Death Wish remake.
[Featured Image by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Paramount Pictures]
