| **SPOILERS** Paul Kersey, Charles Bronson, travels to the East New York section of Brooklyn NY to see an old army buddy of his Charly, Francis Drake, only to find him dying from a beating he got from a gang of thugs for not paying them their weekly protection money. Paul is arrested by the police for Charly's murder because he had a handgun on him, even though Charly was beaten not shot to death, and thrown into a lock-up at the local police 74th precinct. Paul is later attacked by both the prisoners, for standing up to them, and the Police Chief Richard Shriker,Ed Lauter, for giving him <more> lip. Released because of the hard work done for Paul by civil rights attorney Kathryan Davis, Deborah Raffin, with Chief Shriker then planing to use him, clandestinely, against the local neighborhood thugs. Paul then goes back to East New York to see what he can do to help those friends of Charly still living and having to put up with the record crime rate there. By the time that the movie is over there won't one one street gang member left standing and making trouble for the people of that ravaged locality. In the most ferocious and explosive "Death Wish" movie of them all Paul Kersey, who for some reason calls himself Paul Kimble in this film, takes on an entire army of New York street gangs in the burnt-out and devastated battleground of East New York with an arsenal that has just about everything, short of nuclear weapons. The action in "Death Wish 3" is reminiscent of the battle of Stalingrad during the fall and winter of 1942/43 with street-to-street house-to-house and hand-to-hand fighting that left the borough of Brooklyn looking in 1985 like the city of Berlin did in 1945. With hundreds of street gang member civilians and cops dead and wounded in it's smoldering ruins. The local police who were not up to the job to stop the ravaging street gangs on the loose in the streets of Brooklyn gave Paul the green light, through Chief Shriker, to take on the gang members by himself; That's as long as they, the police, get the credit for Paul's successful combat operations against them. Taking out a number of vicious street gang members notably "The Giggler", Kirk Taylor,things turn bad when Paul's lady friend and civil lawyer Kathryan gets killed by gang leader Fraker, Gavan O'Herlihy, and a fellow thug. The two thugs knock Kathryan out and then shove her car into a busy intersection where she was killed in a head-on collision. Paul escapes after he was put into protective custody by Chief Shriker from the re-enforced street gangs after Fraker got hundreds of fellow "gansters" from all over NYC to join him in his war against the good people of East New York. Back in the "Hood" Paul inspires, through his heroic actions, the entire neighborhood to rise up and take on the gangs and even, for once, the totally useless police joined in the fight. Increidable final sequence that rivals anything that you'll see in any major war movie made in or out of Hollywood as full-scale war rages on the battered and bloodied streets of Brooklyn. Paul and his friends and neighbors, as well as the cops, take on the massive hoards of New York street gangs with everything from nail-boards to sticks and stones to heavy machine guns and anti-tank and armor piercing rocket launchers.The final confrontation in the movie has head gang leader Fraker at first surviving a barrage of bullets from Paul's .38 police special, by wearing a bullet-proof vest, getting pulverized into smatterings by a blast from Paul's bazooka. The rocket launching bazooka that Paul used to pulverize the startled Faker was a WMD, weapon of mass destruction, powerful enough to take down a giant B52 bomber!Charles Bronson as the big city vigilante Paul Kersey showed again, like he did in his two previous "Death Wish" films, that when you mess with him and those dear and near to him you've opened the very gates of Hell on yourself. <less> |
