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70Well-made, often intensely gripping genre piece.
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63Wan's movie is very efficient. Bacon, skilled pro that he is, provides the character the movie needs, just as he has in such radically different films as "Where the Truth Lies," "The Woodsman" and "Mystic River."
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63Death Sentence would be right at home as one half of "Grindhouse"'s B-movie double bill.
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60The action sequences are still pretty imaginative, if not nonsensical.
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58The film has one thing going for it--it's certainly never boring.
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50Bears more than a slight connection to the landmark of the genre, 1974's "Death Wish," starring Charles Bronson. It is based on novelist Brian Garfield's sequel to his original book, though any resemblance is tenuous at best.
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50Death Sentence's message - that vengeance is ultimately futile, spinning out a vicious circle of rage and hate - may be commendable, but there's nothing noteworthy about the way Wan, Bacon and their troops go about delivering it.
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50The cynics will slap their foreheads, the squeamish will cover their eyes, but the revenge movie fanatics should be nice and satisfied after the whole ordeal.
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Sadly, Bacon is only intermittently convincing as a man hell-bent on revenge or a father tortured by what he has unleashed on his family.
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50While there is the requisite amount of shorn limbs and splashing blood one might expect from the director of "Saw," Wan should be saluted for putting the coup de grāce off-screen.
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50Death Sentence, directed by "Saw" co-creator James Wan, swings the pendulum too far. One day Nick is a mild-mannered nerd who spends his days making (and loving) risk assessments for his company; the next, he's Travis Bickle from 1976's "Taxi Driver."
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42It's a cartoon that thinks it isn't one.
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Aside from a stunning three-minute tracking shot as the gang pursues Nick through a parking garage, and Mr. Bacon's hauntingly pale, dark-eyed visage, Mr. Wan's film is a tedious, pandering time-waster.
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38Wan wants to have something both ways, and in the end, he gets almost nothing. As Clint Eastwood said in yet another genre picture: A man's gotta know his limitations.
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33The movie has nothing to offer except titillation.
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30The only things anyone's likely to remember, besides Bacon's crazy-eyes act, are John Goodman's soon-to-be-legendary turn as a bilious bug-eyed gun dealer and a hellacious back-alley/parking-garage chase shot from a careening fender-level camera. Like much of the movie, it's as hammily dynamic as it is impossible to swallow.
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This graphically violent film suffers from cursorily developed characters whose primary function is to advance the creaky plot.
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25Bacon's performance in "Saw" creator James Wan's laughably extreme revenge thriller Death Sentence is six degrees of ham.
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25A very belated and very silly follow-up to "Death Wish."
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Almost everything about the movie lands with an emphatic, preordained thud.
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25The film is preposterous on so many counts that it's hard to enumerate them.
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25This film is so superficial and shifts so jarringly in tone that nothing feels authentic -- not Bacon's hard-working husband and father, nor his maniacal vengeance seeker.
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25The morality of revenge is barely at issue in a movie that pushes the plausibility of revenge right over a cliff.
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20One well-staged sequence in a parking garage is the film's only memorable moment
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User score distribution:
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Positive: 15 out of 24
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Mixed: 2 out of 24
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Negative: 7 out of 24
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