Why certain movies are loved by audiences and loathed by "progressive" critics. Thu Jul 15, 2021 The other night, finding myself awake at 3 AM, I poked around Netflix looking for something to fall asleep to, and eventually settled on Eli Roth’s 2018 remake of Death Wish, starring Bruce Willis. I’d watched the classic 1974 original, starring Charles Bronson, several times - in fact I think I saw it, at seventeen, at the time of its movie-theater debut - but I’d never seen the remake, and I assumed it would be a poor copy that would send me off to dreamland quickly enough. In fact I stayed awake to the end. I liked it quite a bit, all in all, and I thought the major changes in the story were good ones: in the new version, for example, the main character, Paul Kersey, is a trauma surgeon instead of an architect, which actually turns out to work much better, plotwise.