Simon Morris reviews the remake of the Death Wish vigilante thriller starring Bruce Willis, The Mercy, and New Zealand documentary Kobi.
Death Wish
An old action star pays tribute to an even older one; the Death Wish films are back.
In the early 1970s dinosaurs walked the earth – action stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Lee and the stone-faced Charles Bronson, all starring in films that couldn’t have been simpler. There are the bad guys. Get ‘em.
They could all have been written by NRA gun nuts, especially the Death Wish series.
Ready or not, there’s a brand-new Death Wish, directed by Eli Roth. He’s more a horror guy, you’d think, than an urban-jungle action man, but here he embraces his inner Michael Winner.
Bruce Willis stars in the role of top surgeon Paul Kersey. (Stop laughing at the back there! Why shouldn’t Willis play a surgeon? In the original, Bronson was an architect.)
It’s his birthday but he’s called back to the hospital, leaving his adorable wife and even more adorable daughter to celebrate alone at home.
Three armed thugs break in, it ends badly and the victims are taken to – wouldn’t you know it – Paul Kersey’s hospital, and he goes to pieces.
Where did he go wrong? Well, the film is already giving us a hint – Kersey tells the investigating police he doesn’t own a firearm.
The police can’t help – they’ve got a wall covered with notices of unsolved murders. It’s pretty obvious – to any member of the NRA at any rate – that the only way Kersey’s going to get any justice is to get it himself. He needs to go and get tooled up.
At this point, the path of Death Wish diverges. It’s still trying to solve the original murder, with a view to exacting revenge. But now there’s also a more general war declared by Kersey on all bad guys.
Whether you believe that the answer to the mounting crime rate is to provide good guys with more fire-power than the bad guys is frankly irrelevant. Death Wish certainly believes it – or, more likely, is cynically aiming itself at people who do.
A sop to enlightened thought is keeping the bad guys as racially non-specific as possible. This film doesn’t want to get bogged down in politics. And some lip-service is paid to the rights and wrongs of gun-crazy vigilantes, but not enough to spoil Bruce Willis’s aim.
In Death Wish land, social media celebrity basically justifies any technical illegality. This film suggests that unthinking public support is a good enough argument to back up the doctor’s one-man crusade.
I can’t criticise Bruce Willis or anyone else suckered into being in Death Wish. A gig is a gig, I realise, even if this gig involves making rubbish for people you hate.
And I think it’s safe to say that this film is unlikely to be troubling the Academy Awards next yea
The Mercy
The Mercy is another half-remembered story from the scrap-book of 20th century scandal – this one taking place in 1968.
We’ve been reminded of the Pentagon Papers in The Post, of the notorious Tonya Harding in I Tonya, and the famous case of John Paul Getty and the Severed Ear in All the Money in the World.
The Mercy features two more dimly remembered names – sailors Donald Crowhurst and Sir Francis Chichester.
Like his near-namesake Sir Francis Drake, Chichester circumnavigated the globe, but single handed and with just one stop-off on the way.
At the start of The Mercy, Chichester announces a prize for the first sailor to circumnavigate the globe non-stop.
But where the other eight contestants are all experienced long-distance sailors, Donald Crowhurst, played with unreasonable optimism by Colin Firth, is a weekend sailor. In fact, to call him a rank amateur is rather flattering him.
But like any great adventurer of fact or fiction Crowhurst has that one necessary requirement - “a dream”.
And because his wife Clare loves him she supports him unquestioningly – but obviously in the hopes that the scheme will run out of puff and money before it actually takes place.
Rachel Weisz is a good choice to play Clare Crowhurst and, once you get used to the usually buttoned-up Firth playing a driven adventurer, he’s rather good too.
Crowhurst raises some money, but clearly not quite enough. Corners are cut, and there’s a sense that the project is being driven by the financial backers and Crowhurst’s new publicity man, played by David Thewless
It’s Crowhurst’s fate to catch the mood of the late Sixties, with England swinging away, and the newly upbeat public clamouring for more British heroes like Francis Chichester.
The other contestants are professional heroes, while Crowhurst is that well-loved figure, the British amateur, muddling through.
The public may be keen, but Crowhurst himself is developing cold feet. He knows that neither he nor his boat are anything like ready for this terrifying challenge. In the end he feels he’s got no choice, and sets off to an uncertain horizon.
As the venture inevitably starts springing leaks – both real and metaphorical - Crowhurst finds himself losing his grasp on reality. His regular phone calls home become less and less moored to real life.
There comes a moment when he makes a desperate decision. He’s going to have to cheat.
The story of Crowhurst in The Mercy – the title comes from one of the more garbled messages home he sent during his voyage – was covered 10 years ago in a documentary called Deep Water.
The documentary that stuck to the known facts but The Mercy director James Marsh and writer Scott Z Burns decided to make a few leaps of faith. In fact, the story they suggest is so plausible I was surprised to learn how much of Crowhurst’s fate was fictionalized.
Colin Firth plays a deluded loser very convincingly, even if he hasn’t had much experience playing one before.
And when the moral comes at the end it may be a little glib, but it’s still sadly relevant in the world of reality TV and the constant clamour for celebrity
Kobi
The old rule of creative literature and film-making is write what you know, even if in New Zealand we occasionally take this to extremes.
Kobi is a voyage round Andrea Bosshard’s father, the famous jeweller Kobi Bosshard.
It follows a long, occasionally distinguished, tradition of documentaries about members of the film-maker’s family by Bosshard and co-director Shane Loader.
Kobi looks fabulous. Since no cinematographer is credited, I have to assume the wonderful camera work is by Bosshard and Loader themselves.
We’re taken to the various locations in New Zealand where Swiss-born Kobi Bosshard set up shop.
His story isn’t very different from many European immigrants who arrived here after World War II.
They came for the adventure of landing on the other side of the world, then stayed for the outdoor life – Kobi was a very keen mountain-climber – and for the women.
In Kobi’s case, the woman was the equally glamorous Patricia, subsequently his wife. Then and now the Bosshards make a very striking couple.
Co-director Andrea Bosshard follows the life of her father, his undoubtedly strong impact on the local jewellery scene, as well as his work practice.
Personally, I could have used more coverage of Kobi’s jewellery-making – I realised I had no idea how one transforms a dull stick of metal into the extraordinary creations Bosshard came up with.
I suspect that all those formative years working in her father’s studio have been enough for Andrea Bosshard. Is she “done with jewellery? I’m not sure, but she seems to have no desire to stay in there any longer than she has to. Maybe she assumes we all know how it’s done.
Structurally Kobi was clearly a challenge – not only the broad range of subject matter the film-makers wished to cover, but the raw material.
Like many families of the time the Bosshards were clearly keen home movie makers – a love that for Andrea later turned into a career.
As well as Bosshard and Loader’s own camera work, there’s material from a wide range of historic sources, including black and white footage from TV interviews of the 1960s.
But the most touching scenes come from a trip Andrea and her father take to Switzerland to see friends and family Kobi stayed in touch with for over 50 years.
Kobi is long and leisurely – whether it’s too long is a matter of personal preference – and at times I could have used more of Andrea’s evocative narration about her relationship with both parents.
The obvious comparison is with Hugh McDonald’s equally charming family portrait, No Ordinary Sheila, and I’m sure this film will do equally well with the same audience.
Like many of these films we go in to look at the way we were, perhaps. The old footage of 60s and 70s New Zealand and New Zealanders is often achingly nostalgic.
But we stay to see where we are now; Kobi and Patricia Bosshard, of course, but also the rest of us.
