"Death Sentence"

So, I thought it was time I update, and a movie seems like a good thing to update about. Saturday, Mike and I saw two movies. This might have been a bad idea on our part seeing as how I had to work and go to church in the morning. However, what's done is done. We saw "Death Sentence" and "Superbad."

Superbad, was well, super-bad. That's not true. It had a cute idea behind it, and I liked parts of it, but there was just too much stuff that I disliked about it to really say more than that. At that point, though, I was tired. (I put my head on his arm and left it there for the whole movie. He seemed okay with that. The theater security guard, though, stood behind us, like he thought we were going to get all hot and heavy in the movie theater. Puh-lease, we're not 13.)

Death Sentence, which we saw first, was amazing. It has an interesting style, going back and forth between a clear, standard movie type of filming, very crisp and perfunctory, and then a hazy, film. Parts of it made me think, "Documentary" though it was clearly an action film.

What is this movie about, you ask? A man (Nick Hume, played by Kevin Bacon), who works for risk assessment has 2 sons (Brendan and Lucas), and a beautiful wife. The oldest son (Brendan) is kinda the Star, y'know the type: the light in Dad's eye, can do no wrong... and he's a hockey player, talking about going to college in Canada to play. Now, I'd seen previews for this movie, so I already knew that Brendan died. (Sorry, but I'm really not spoiling anything there.) What got me is this, on they way home from a Hockey game where Brendan started, they're getting gas and Nick calls his wife. Get this: he leaves a message basically saying that Brendan has decided to go to Canada to play college hockey, and since they were already on the road, they decided to just take him to the airport and drop him off. "So, we'll probably never see our son again. You're okay with that, right?"

Seconds later, a bunch of kids enter the gas station where the son is buying a slurpee and they rob the gas station and kill Brendan. Though Nick takes Brendan to the to the hospital, by then it's too late.

The kid who killed him gets hit by car and then picked up by the police. Nick is told that by convicting the kid, they can guarantee that he'll be in prison five years. That's it. This is also where he learns that basically his son was killed as part of a gang initiation. He lets the kid go, then kills him. The cops tell him about it, but they let it go down as a gang war.

Mike leaned over to me at this point and tells me that it's true: the cops wouldn't pursue the case. I thought that was interesting.

The thing is, Nick's action strikes a gang war, they retaliate, he retaliates. The end question is basically: how far would you go? What would you do for revenge? Would you leave it to the police? Or would you take it into your own hands?