For original Death Wish director Michael Winner, the franchise had become a source of violent and crass black comedy, basically into self-parody by the time of Death Wish 3. For Thompson however, the opportunity to essay an existing vigilante figure soon offered him the chance to further explore his characteristic concern for the clash between socially responsible Patriarchal authority and individualized self-righteous action. Thus, for Death Wish 4, the new premise had Bronson tackle a more complete social problem – the influence of drugs – which in turn revealed Thompson’s concern for a figure who was willing to set aside the pettiness of his own vigilante actions in order to tackle a more pernicious and representative social ill. In this way, the vigilante figure became not just a mythical antidote to street crime but a quasi- archetypal independent authority. By tackling a problem such as drugs, it was felt that the self-righteousness of the vigilante figure finally intersected a truly socially-righteous agenda. Bronson was in this way re-integrated into the functioning of Patriarchal justice, albeit still outside legal authority and thus open to manipulation by unscrupulous men. The film’s irony is that the social good Bronson does by eliminating the drug lords comes at a price – not his sanity but his vigilantism itself as Thompson probes the balance between righteous action and such action as manipulated for selfish personal gain.
Bronson’s vigilante is here both a social mythic figure and a tool for reactionary selective deployment – a functionary. His self-righteousness has become a tool to be exploited by those who have another agenda. In that, his accepted status as a lone justice figure again becomes relative not to law and order but to individual greed. No matter how Bronson feels he is doing a socially just action thus, his actions fold in against themselves and can only be worked out as aggressive explosion – the assertion of an individualized code of honor through violent action. In this way, Thompson suggests that no how much Bronson’s acts may indeed serve a social good in eliminating drugs, at root they remain a selfish and reactionary form of righteous self-aggrandizement and the actions of a self-obsessed figure, hence the film’s commencement in dream which indicates just how self-obsessed he has become, clinging to notions of greater moral validity to justify his status as killer little different from those killers on the other side of law and anarchy. Throughout the Death Wish films, Bronson had essayed the fine line between vigilante outrage and anarchic violence for its own sake and here in Part 4, he again suggests the balance between righteous action and self-indulgence – however, as the vigilante figure needs to claim social function, his desires make him easily manipulated by the will of outsiders. Sadly however, much of the film is routine and staid. read more