In 1974, the critics panned Death Wish, but the public loved it. In 2018, the critics likewise panned Death Wish, but this time their judgment prevailed. My nearest multiplex is two hours away in Burlington, Vermont: It has a pseudo-IMAX in Cinema 1, Cinemas 2-9 are for the superheroes and emojis and lego movies, and Cinema 10 is a small screening room you can rent for private parties and, when such bookings are lacking, it's where the art-house and Oscar-bait stuff winds up, plus Brit flicks that don't quite travel (like Sacha Baron Cohen's Brothers Grimsby). It wasn't a good sign that Death Wish was in Cinema 10 in its second week and that, aside from us, a party of three pimply teenagers were the only other patrons.
I find the failure of Death Wish oddly dispiriting, if largely self-inflicted. Indeed, a consolation of the remake is that it has given me a renewed appreciation of the skill of the original, including even the aspects of it I once disliked. The first Death Wish is a remarkable social artifact, a valuable record of the day before yesterday – 1974 – when New York and many other American cities seemed in large part ungovernable. By the time of the 2003 power outage in a tamed Giulianified metropolis, it was all over, and disappointed reporters waxed nostalgic as they tried to explain why this time there had been no reprise of the looting rampage that accompanied the 1977 blackout. Back then, much of New York seemed to be permanently trembling on the brink of social collapse, and literally switching off the lights was a mere formality.
What's all this got to do with Death Wish? More than you'd think. Then as now, almost all critics felt obliged to deplore the film – "a revenge fantasy deemed morally abhorrent by many," as The New York Times sniffed. As morally abhorrent revenge fantasies go, you're better off with The Count Of Monte Cristo. Yet, despite being the work of two men – Italy's Dino de Laurentiis (producer) and Britain's Michael Winner (director) – largely regarded as a joke by serious film types, it's actually a very thoughtful piece. Bronson plays Paul Kersey, a successful Manhattan architect, a mild-mannered conscientious objector from the Korean War, and a proponent of gun control. In other words, he's a "bleeding-heart liberal", as a colleague labels him during an early exchange that manages with remarkable economy to alight on all the problems of the day: rising crime, white flight, high taxes, useless police. Bronson's character is untouched by these troubles until muggers break into his apartment, rape his daughter and murder his wife. The cops tell him there's virtually no chance the perpetrators will ever be found: "In the city, that's just the way it is."
We all know what happens next: Paul Kersey decides that that's no longer gonna be the way it is.
Lots have things have changed in the 2018 version, written by Joe Carnahan and directed by Eli Roth. Instead of Manhattan, we're in Chicago, whose real-life weekend body counts are today's version of "just the way it is". Instead of an architect, Paul Kersey is a doctor at a local hospital who spends his nights patching up the conveyor belt of gunshot victims passing through his emergency room. There is, obviously, an intended irony about this new Kersey's career choice, but, just in case we miss it, Eli Roth, as is his directorial wont, spells it out: once the killing starts, he splits the screen showing us Kersey brandishing his scalpel by day, and by night brandishing his gun. One saves life, one takes it - geddit?
I'm all for symbolism, but this is moronic. In changing Paul Kersey from an accountant (in Brian Garfield's original novel) to architect, Michael Winner's film made the contrast that matters: between those who build - an office block, a city, a civilization - and those who can only destroy. More importantly, Bronson's Kersey is not part of "the system": He can afford his illusions, he's living life apart from the city's dysfunction - or so he thinks. The new Paul Kersey is a part of that system, desensitized to mayhem by his day job. When he drones the standard line to a dead cop's partner - "We did everything we could" - it's the equivalent of that copper in the original saying, "That's just the way it is." The '74 Paul Kersey was stunned to discover "the way it is"; the 2018 Kersey lives it every day.
Did I mention he's now Bruce Willis? Charles Bronson, with that great craggy face and weary eyes, was certainly a plausible tough guy. But he'd spent the decade before Death Wish in Europe, where he became a Number One box-office star, adored by the French as le sacre monstre and by the Italians as il bruto. The only English-language directors partial to him were Brits - not just Michael Winner but also 007's Terence Young. Willis, however, has spent the last three decades faux-shooting punks in one of the most lucrative American action franchises of all time: It's what he does. Bronson's Seventies mop and porn 'stache is startling, but, unlike Willis' shaven head, it doesn't advertise that hey, it's the Die Hard guy pretending to be a surgeon with a nice home in the suburbs. Casting doesn't have to be fatal, but Willis, who can be rather charming in non-shooting roles (Nobody's Fool), can barely conceal his boredom in the pre-mayhem part of the story. As the happily married Dr Kersey with a daughter headed to college, he sleepwalks through the domestic-bliss prelude. Called a "pussy" by some jerk in the park, he looks as blank as a Bruce Willis body-double who finds himself accidentally stuck in one of the dialogue scenes.
The one failure of the original, I always felt, came from the classiest name attached to the project – the jazz pianist Herbie Hancock, whose 1974 score is irritatingly obtrusive and mannered in what's otherwise a very real picture. Or so I thought. The remake has far more conventional action-movie musical accompaniment - by Ludwig Göransson, who's also the composer on what critics regard as the anti-Death Wish, the Wakandan paean Black Panther. Göransson's is just the usual scuzzy low-grade "score" that accompanies extras getting blown away. By contrast, the Herbie Hancock riffs are nobody's idea of music to kill guys to, but they suit Charles Bronson: They're what he might have had in his LP collection. So it's a bit like me turning into a killing machine to the accompaniment of "Marshmallow World". Which would be odd but apt. More subtly, it's a reminder that the protagonist of the film is not from the thug world: He is a civilized man attempting to protect that civilization - and so, for all its sore-thumbiness, the Hancock score underlines the point that jazz, nightlife, art, sophistication, urbanity, all are imperiled when the goons rule the streets. In the Bruce Willis version, the music sounds merely like the usual thumping bass Bruce blows away muthaf**kers to. (I understand that Mr Göransson first came to Hollywood's attention after producing such Childish Gambino tracks as "F**k It All".)
That said, let me credit Carnahan and Roth with a small but significant improvement on the original. In '74, Bronson butches up when work takes him away from the urban wasteland to Arizona. "This is gun country," says a realtor, explaining that most of the guys round here pack heat and that's why you can walk the streets safely. "Muggers jes' plain get their asses blown out." Bronson returns to the city a changed man.
In the new version, the body of Bruce Willis' murdered wife (Elisabeth Shue) is returned to her home town in rural Texas. On their way back from the funeral, Willis' father-in-law (a worn, weathered Len Cariou) suddenly jerks his pick-up off the road, picks up his shotgun, and opens fire on some fleeing poachers. "If a man wants to protect what's his," he says, "he has to do it for himself." Delivered by the father of the woman Willis' character failed to protect, it is a line designed to cut deep, and it does: Bronson was the victim of a cruel fate; Willis is being informed that's he failed as a man.
Michael Winner told his story briskly but with an eye for the telling detail – the supermarket guards intimidated by the gangs, the subway police turning a blind eye to the punks terrorizing their passengers, the busted payphones so routinely out of order that even a cop can't find one that works. It's a perfect time capsule of a failed age. In 2018 Chicago, things work - phones, computers, GPS - but the people are taking on the character of those busted payphones. The Police Commissioner in the first movie and the critics who reviewed it both called Bronson a "vigilante". But, in fact, Winner was scrupulous about showing Bronson only shooting those who first threaten him. To be sure, he sort of goes looking for trouble. But in 1970s New York you didn't have to look far: just go to the park, ride the subway, take an evening stroll. Willis, on the other hand, cuts straight to Death Wish II, climbing into a hoodie and going out at night to hunt down and whack random low-lifes who've caught his attention. Like many critics, by the way, I'm not happy about the hoodie - not because it's "cultural appropriation", but because it suggests a man can only man up and fight back by becoming one of them. I prefer the way Charles Bronson deals with, say, a subway mugger (see above) while still wearing his sports coat.
In the original novel, the Kersey family is attacked by a black gang. The '74 film, in an excess of caution, had the Kersey women preyed on by young Jeff Goldblum, looking like a goofy Jewish Jughead, plus (if memory serves) an Irish- and a Greek-American. The remake restores something closer to statistical probability: It's the valet parker at the restaurant who slyly photographs the Kerseys' home address from the dashboard info console - and his name, we learn, is Miguel. Thereafter, there is no shortage of Hispanics and blacks among Bruce Willis' corpse count - even if, in a touching tribute to the heartwarming vibrancy of diversity, in today's Chicago apparently blacks, whites and Latinos all enjoy being together in the same gang. Still, as real-life talk-radio jock Sway Calloway complains in the picture, "You got a white guy in a hoodie killing black people - you don't have a problem with that?" Eli Roth returns again and again to Sway and our old friend Mancow in their radio studios debating the merits of vigilante justice - to the point where it's rather too obvious he's using them as pre-emptive cover. But it does remind you that in today's America "a white guy in a hoodie killing black people", however criminal they might be, would be George Zimmermaned by the media pretty instantly.
So why did the film flop? Is it just ruthless demographic arithmetic? All the white guys who cheered Charles Bronson are now forty years older and less inclined to venture out to the local fleapit? Or is it that the bigger budget and bigger star somehow made the actual story smaller and less primal? As the film goes on, Willis' methods of dispatch, including a bowling ball and brake fluid, get ever cuter, as if to absolve the carnage from anything to do with reality.
It's a great shame, especially if it emboldens lefty cultural critics to think they've won some sort of grand victory over a film they dismiss as NRA propaganda. But it has to be said that Bruce & Co largely brought it on themselves: I regard Willis as more or less a good thing, but I would advise him to eschew remakes - because, as with Day of the Jackal, he keeps making them worse. I left that shrunken cinema in Vermont with a renewed appreciation for Charles Bronson's leathery visage and squinty eyes. You didn't need to know the specifics – World War Two tailgunner, one of 15 kids of a Lithuanian coal-miner. You could see it in the crevices and grooves: Bronson was one of the last movie stars to project a sense of experience beyond cinema. Who does so now? Pretty boys like Tom Cruise? CGI action figures like Chris Hemsworth? Yet it's Bronson who makes you see the whole point of movies: it's a face made for close-up. I don't know what he was like as a fledgling stage actor in Philadelphia in 1947, but I can't believe it had the power of the big screen. He's a classic movie tough guy – an economic actor, taciturn and stoic; he exudes male strength rather than displaying it.
Bronson's first outing as Paul Kersey represents a rare moment when a motion picture tapped into a genuine populist anger, as opposed to mere cocktail-party causes. It was famously said at the time that a neo-conservative was a liberal who'd been mugged. That's what de Laurentiis, Winner and Bronson gave us in Death Wish: a liberal mugged by reality, in one of the defining documents of a wretched decade. You know the remake's gone badly wrong when you're pining for the taste and sensitivity and artistic integrity of Michael Winner.
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The original is way before my time but the name Charles Bronson invokes certain images nonetheless. And yay! A Herbie Hancock mention!
You can slice and dice this movie. At the end of the day my husband and I went to the movies to be entertained. And we were.
The "Death Wish" movies are always fun to watch, but they eventually became violent cartoons. For example, "Death Wish 3", with Martin Balsam and Ed Lauter. Charles Bronson parlayed his very limited acting ability into Hollywood success. (Same with Clint Eastwood.)
Film budget was $30 million, and it grossed $31 mullion first couple of weeks just US gate. Apparently other areas see more virtues in this story than does rural Vermont, home of most of the world's Bernie supporters..
Perspicacity is the word that popped in my head after reading about two movies I haven't seen but I am overly familiar with the action movie genre and have read a large number of mystery novels, both good and less good. Now the phrase nickel word closely followed as I had to look up the meaning (and spelling) of perspicacity in order to know what I was thinking - archaic meaning: "keen vision" - word root - perspective or perceive. Then out of curiosity I had to look up the phrase nickel word which I thought of as the nickel that mom or dad rewarded for learning or using the words on your weekly vocabulary word list. There I was wrong. The phrase may instead be attributed to Mark Twain who also was prone to literary review and took on the work of Fenimore Cooper whose book The Deerslayer I have read and am prone to agree with Mark Twain - "don't use a nickel word when a six-bit word will do instead," to paraphrase as the exact quote is lost in a longer search engine result, but this article includes the review: https://medium.com/the-mission/mark-twains-writing-guide-18-rules-governing-literary-art-d97f6bde3799
My wordless Accolades - !!! - yes white men in hoodies shouldn't be hunting down people of color or anyone.
Twain's full--and hilarious--attack on Fenimore Cooper and The Deerslayer is here. That piece doesn't contain the phrase about "nickel words," though it does slam Cooper for failing to use the mot juste--on which Twain himself always insisted.
I'm not sure where the "nickel word" quote comes from (the usual formulation is "never use a quarter word when a nickel word will do the job"...six bits would be 75 cents, so the version you heard reverses the meaning) but it certainly does fit Twain's writing philosophy.
Love Charles Bronson but it wasn't a Slav who was the one with mining experience in the real life Great Escape by a Canadian who had worked underground in Cape Breton.
For this movie to succeed today the perps would need to be Antifa hoodlums beating to death the wife of a woke liberal who was attending a free speech rally as a photo journalist. The woke liberal realizes that Antifa isn't just about hunting Fascists and sets out to take them down.
No version of Death Wish will play well with liberals today. There simply aren't enough muggings. But the Antifa version will play well to conservatives. Hollywood would never make that version.
Steyn's writing is a pair of glasses that sharpens and focuses your sight.
Perfect! :-)
'The Police Commissioner in the first movie and the critics who reviewed it both called Bronson a "vigilante". But, in fact, Winner was scrupulous about showing Bronson only shooting those who first threaten him.'
That's true, but he goes beyond defending himself. Most of his opponents have knives and fall down after being shot once, but he takes the trouble to stand there and add another bullet or two to "make sure." In his last fight, he's also chasing one of the others who's run away and who's determined to escape. When your attacker is no longer a threat, you have to stop shooting, or it's no longer self-defense, but on-the-spot execution.
Historical vigilantes at their best--such as the Anti-Horse Thief Association--made citizens' arrests and brought the malefactors back for trial. They were trying to enforce the law when government enforcement wasn't enough. Kersey isn't exactly a vigilante either (neither is the police "death squad" in Magnum Force, whose leader excuses them because "history justified the vigilantes")--since he's imposing a death sentence for mugging at a time when the courts would not.
Never seen the original (it was before my time) but now I want to. Great review, Mark. You painted the picture of where the new one went wrong so acutely I feel like I've seen them both. Now I have to!
Hey Mark,
Having lived in Brooklyn for a time in those just-post-Godfather-days, I remember how it was out on the streets and in the subways back then. I also remember the hero status of Bernhard Goetz, whose name and/or deeds weren't mentioned at all in your piece, but should have been. A slight but pithy loss, I feel, probably due to our common German Stammbaum.
Never seen the original (it was before my time) but now I want to. Great review, Mark. You painted the picture of where the new one went wrong so acutely I feel like I've seen them both. Now I have to!
"Bronson was one of the last movie stars to project a sense of experience beyond cinema."
True! I tried thinking of another actor who conveys a sense life before film, and I think I have one--though, God knows, he was made for film: Sean Connery. The young Connery is too pretty to compare to the world-weary, baggy-eyed Bronson, but whether sipping a martini in a tuxedo or psychoanalyzing Tippi Hedren, his loose-limbed laconic style suggests a past lived on real streets, not Hollywood backlots. By the time of Hunt for Red October, his Scottish-burred Russian accent can't detract form his complete authority over the rest of the cast, especially the callow Alec Baldwin. Connery may never have captained a Russian submarine, but he did serve in the Royal Navy. Baldwin worked as a busboy at Studio 54; Bruce Willis was a personal trainer at an Upper West Side health club. Both honorable jobs, but you can bet their tattoos read other than Connery's maritime ink: "Mum and Dad" and "Scotland Forever".
PS: Michael Caine, too, but maybe some other time.
"Harry Brown" is a brilliant film; Telford etc etc etc without the "religious" aspect. A sequel would be timely.
"Bronson was one of the last movie stars to project a sense of experience beyond cinema." Such a great line.
Which is why "The Man Who would be King" is one of the great all time movies.
I was going to mention this too but you beat me to it. Bronson (and Connery) were part of what will probably be remembered as the last generation of actors, directors, and writers who were formed by lives and experiences outside of "show business." One of the things that continues to make the films of the thirties, forties and event he fifties so compelling was that nearly all of the big-time talent had either come up the hard way through vaudeville and the stage (Joan Crawford, Bob Hope Betty Davis, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney) or had spent their formative years outside of "movieland." Great directors like William Wellman, Billy Wilder, and Raoul Walsh led early lives that were "interesting" (Wilder) to actually dangerous (Walsh). Same for their generations of writers and scenarists. (The great and underappreciated American screenwriter W.R. Burnett spent years doing menial jobs in the "bad parts of town" before hitting it big with his novel, "Little Caesar.")
Now nearly everyone in the movies (or TV) business has been in it since 8th grade. They join film clubs in high school, major in film making or screenwriting or theater in college, intern with a movie (or TV) company and then go to work (if they are lucky) with a production organization. For all his genius, Steven Spielberg has never led a life outside of movie making.
Increasingly the actors, producers writers and directors are the sons and daughters of actors, writers, producers and directors. When "all you know is the movies" then the movies you make become pale copies of what you have seen or (increasingly apparent) serve merely to confirm the prejudices of the rather clubby society that you have grown up in. You never here of the son or daughter of some top-flight actor or producer saying, "Dad - I don't want to go into show business. I'm setting my sights on being a high-school teacher or insurance executive." I submit that this is why modern films are so repetitive, predictable and airless. But I'm an old crock who probably doesn't know any better. . .
For an old crock, you make good points.
Upon reflection, the paragon of the actor who seemed dimensions beyond the mere actor was Spencer Tracy. Who else had the spine to stand up to Katharine Hepburn (and not even him always)? Hepburn sure thought so.
Among more recent exemplars, I would also nominate Gene Hackman. As I pause to look up their early careers (Connery, Caine, Tracy, Hackman, and certainly Bronson), I see that they seem to play fuller characters because they have led fuller lives. Nothing against Al Pacino, whose work I admire, but he's a hothouse orchid compared to these hardened types. Maybe it was the military, or maybe it was a life that permitted service in the military, but those not to the stage born have a sense of confidence and self-security absent in many of those born after compulsory military service. No matter how demanding, no petulant director could supplant a drill instructor or North Korean sniper in one's nightmares.
PS: I was about to cite Jeff Bridges as an exception--a confident, self-secure actor like those above, but who had acting in his blood (literally) from birth. But I see that even he served in the Coast Guard Reserve (even if it was to avoid Vietnam). There may be something to this...
A few years ago, on a very cold winter weekend, we had people over for a James Bond marathon. I don't remember in which movie, but there was a scene with Sean Connery as Bond, in a pair of tight, white tennis short-shorts. The women were agog and after the scene one immediately demanded, "Rewind it!" It was then that I understood Mr. Connery's appeal to the fairer sex. He's no Paul Newman on the handsomeness scale, but he is cool and confident, and not trying too hard.
I saw the title, "Death Wish", and assumed this was a column about Great Britain or Europe or the United States or Canada or Australia or Western Civilization. Oops, wrong column.
Charles Branson once made a somewhat forgotten movie in my home town of Folkestone of Kent in England. Called 'Someone Behind the Door'. A movie I once caught by chance late night on the BBC back in the 1980's. I can always remember the shock of suddenly realising that's where I used to play as a child. A French produced movie albeit in English starring Anthony Perkins and Jill Ireland. Filmed back in 1971. Unlike a lot of modern movies. And I guess it helped it was shot in my begotten home town. A movie I will always remember.
I'm surprised Mark didn't mention the knockoff version of "Death Wish" thst preceded the current edition by Eli Roth. That would be 2007's "The Brave One" where Jody Foster takes on the role of NYC vigilante to avenge her murdered boyfriend.
This SHOULD have been the urban revenge fantasy that even a professional critic could love. The Foster character plays a feminist NPR late-night radio host dishing out freshman-level philosophical musings along with smooth jazz. Not only that but Jody always feels just terrible after blowing away some Central Casting punk. This should have been nectar for the critics but, as I recall, they didn't like it. They didn't HATE it but you could see that they were uncomfortable with the idea that a stereotypical (almost comically conventional)New York liberal would engage in gun-toting slaughter of bad guys. I suppose feminists want equality all over the but not when it involves gritty, as opposed to cartoonish, homicide.
Allowing Bruce Willis to take on a bevy of Benetton thugs demonstrates a bit of gumption on the part of the producers - considering that I have yet to see a home invasion TV spot that features any other perpetrator besides a white man. Too bad this bit of boldness, such as it is, was not deployed in a subtler and more useful fashion. The movie "Dear White People" actually flirted with some subversive ideas (from a woke social justice warrior's point of view) by presenting a nerdy Trekkie who is not much interested in qualifying his blackness or trying to ingratiate himself with the school's black minority (or majority - I can't remember if the fictitious university is an historical black college or not). Moreover, the half-white female character gets a dressing-down for being a racial martinet; punctilious to the point of parody concerning her self-image and the projection thereof. Unfortunately, whatever potential the movie has is quickly snuffed out by its crashing non sequitur of a concluding message: to wit, wearing a goofy Obama mask is racist. No reflection on the flaws in race-based matriculation policies, which primarily benefit the upper sigma of the black/Latino/whatever bell curves, but such tosh as benefits the Obama narrative.
Ah Benetton. They did diversity before diversity was cool. Now they are selling gender-themed t-shirts with slogans like, "Gender Free Zone", "Colors Don't Have Gender", and the male and female symbols combined into one with a question mark in the center. They also have hoodies, modeled on their website by white people.
"as real-life talk-radio jock Sway Calloway complains in the picture, "You got a white guy in a hoodie killing black people - you don't have a problem with that?"
Libs in real life have no problem when black guys in hoodies kill far more whites per capita than the other way around. Or how about when black guys in hoodies kill THOUSANDS of their fellow blacks ANNUALLY? Still crickets from white libs.
Added to the Left's false narrative that vigilante whites and police are mowing down blacks on their way to complete their doctoral studies we now have the Black Panther's mythical comic book Utopia of Wakanda where blacks are both virtuous and competent, presumably because white racism is not hampering them. There is not a single Wakanda on the face of this planet, even where whites never colonized. (And frankly, areas of white colonization had a head start when turned over to black control but were run into the ground as Rhodesia to Zimbabwe and now South Africa following the same downward trajectory),
You are so wrong. Why, just yesterday I saw a yuuge rally in Washington protesting gun violence. What? Never mind.
And that anti-gun rally was woefully underrepresented by young black males who are the main demographic of gun violence in America (both as perpetrators and victims.). It consisted of a bunch of young, primarily white, brainwashed SJW girls & feminized boys doing their best to get a CNN/MSNBC/CBS/ABC/NBC talking head show. The uselessness and narcissism of the rally even surpassed Live Aid of the 80's.
Bronson was a man for all seasons. In "The Great Escape" he was the Slav coal miner who dug the tunnels and then panicked when it was time to use them. He played an Apache, a soldier, a hired killer -- and made them all believable.
I think his best moment was in "The Magnificent Seven". He's in a gunfight with the bad guys and three Mexican boys who idolize him run up behind him, worried. His character becomes clearly concerned with the safety of the boys. He cares for them. Hard to do while telling them to get out of there. He was an actor and a movie star. That's a short list.
You are 100% right about Bronson in "The Magnificent Seven". However, my favorite recollection is his speech to the boys. They complained to Bronson that 'our fathers are cowards', and he went off on them. "Do you understand how much courage it takes to have children? To take on the responsibility of a family?". Highlighting the difference between bravado and courage is something our society could use.
"Bronson's (is) a face made for close-up."
Right. In "Once Upon a Time in the West" (1968) there's a series of close ups alternating between him and Fonda that get closer and closer until in the final one you just see his eyes which on the big screen are about 15 feet apart. Brilliant!
Mark,
Thanks for the comparative review. One scene from the Bronson version that always comes vividly to my mind when the movie is discussed is when he invites his son over for dinner after the carnage done to his wife and daughter . The stereo is blasting (can't recall the tune but it sounded like the music you'd hear in elevators or department stores in the 70's) as if its the only thing that will keep the trauma out of his mind. He then asks his son how he likes the liver he is cooking for dinner and the elder Kersey says he is cooking it rare, as if underscoring the rawness of his feelings and fortelling the revenge he is planning to undertake. Great scene.
So I guess you didn't like it? Took ya long enough to get it out!!
Perhaps you give the new Death Wish too much credit by reviewing it at all. I regarded it as a drive-in sort of movie: just an hour and a half of light entertainment without commitment or much thinking required. I didn't think it had the continuity - the "evenness" - of the original, and the few PC nods were slightly jarring and completely unnecessary - perhaps made all the more jarring because it wasn't start-to-finish PC - but overall I got my money's worth. I believe Joe Bob Briggs would advise, "Check it out."