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Punishers in the Big Apple's rotten core, "our Waterloo, baby." The neighborhood has a hoodlum problem, a clandestine collective of outraged citizens seeks its own brutal justice, Fred Williamson steps out of the gloom to voice the credo: "If you want your city back, you gotta take it. Dig it?" His pal (Robert Forster) believes in order, and for his trouble finds his wife (Rutanya Alda) assaulted and young son killed in a home invasion. To rub salt on the wound, he's sent up the river for contempt of court while the gang leader (Willie Colón) receives a slap on the wrist. He reenters society with blood in his eye. "We got a system of laws..." "System, my ass!" Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 and Hill's The Warriors are the exemplars for the urban welter of crumbling graffiti, gratifyingly engineered by William Lustig with an ear for the heavy synthesizer engulfing an anxious bystander and an eye for innocent viscera blowing out of a suburban window. The earnest district attorney (Carol Lynley) cannot compete with the oil slick in a suit that is the defense shyster (Joe Spinell), the protagonist gains grittier wisdom from the veteran convict (Woody Strode) who comes to his rescue in the prison showers. Proletarian anger colors the grime, laborers turned avengers feel it along with an underfunded police force and the malefactors themselves. ("Damn recession," mutters a pimp examining the evening's meager earnings.) A note of sadness is rung as the headlight of an ambushed cop car slowly expires following a blizzard of bullets, a sense of desolation completed with a view from the industrial precipice after a vehement chase through Queens. From there the only direction is farce, as demonstrated by Winner in Death Wish 3. With Richard Bright, Don Blakely, Joseph Carberry, Frank Pesce, Steve James, Randy Jurgensen, and Vincent Beck.
--- Fernando F. Croce |