Brief 'Sentence'

Caught up with "Death Sentence" on Friday, which is a good thing since it fell out of the top 10 over the weekend and won't be around much longer. The film got little promotion and no press screenings, but it's not nearly as bad as I feared. It starts strong, establishing a loving family led by Kevin Bacon via home movie flashbacks (that's become a cliche, but it works here). Within minutes, Bacon's on-screen kid gets slashed by a thug-in-training and suddenly it's "Death Wish 2007." Actually, the new film is based on the story by Brian Garfield, who wrote the novel that begat Charles Bronson's "Death Wish." Bacon makes the Everyman turned killer as believable as the generic script will allow, but in the final reel whatever freshness existed within the story disappears in a hail of bullets.
"Sentence" comes on the heels of "The Brave One," another vigilante pic starring Jodie Foster. The latter, opening Sept. 14, strains for higher moral ground (my review will appear here on Thursday) but "Death Sentence" delivers precisely what one might expect from the genre.