Death Wish 4: The Crackdown (1987)

Written by kevin2019 on February 22, 2024

"Death Wish 4: The Crackdown" really ought to have a more routine and listless quality about it by this late date and while there is a faint sense of that detectable here it isn't as prevalent as it could have been. The film pushes incredibly hard to create some sort of new and innovative angle on its central theme - a theme which has now gone from being highly controversial and politically and socially divisive to becoming acceptable and commonplace action movie fodder in just a span of fifteen years - to trigger the mayhem and by and large this results in a much better film than you could have ever expected. There is still an abundance of gunplay on display, but fortunately the unpalatable and lurid violence towards women (which still exists here to a certain extent) receives far less attention from screenwriter Gail Morgan Hickman than some of her male counterparts in previous times and best of all there are no deliberately cruel and horrifically over extended rape scenes to fast forward through this time around.