Trailer
Plot summary
Nick Hume is a vice president at an insurance company, married to Helen, with two sons, Brendan and Lucas. After a hockey game, Nick drives Brendan home and stops at a gas station, where the two become caught up in a robbery. Billy, the gang's leader, kills the clerk, and Joe Darley cuts Brendan's throat during his initiation. Brendan dies at the hospital. Nick identifies Joe in a lineup, and the prosecutor tells him that Joe would receive a light sentence.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Death Sentence (2007)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Brian Garfield was disappointed with the 1974 film of his novel Death Wish and wrote a sequel, 1975's Death Sentence; Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus disliked the second novel and decided to purchase the rights to Garfield's characters instead of adapting it.
- After reading Garfield's novels and seeing all the film adaptions, James Wan was inspired to adapt Death Sentence, and he hired Garfield to write the first few drafts, with the final script written by Ian Mackenzie Jeffers.
- Garrett Hedlund was chosen to play Billy Darley, the main villain and leader of the gang; he was asked to shave his head and gain weight for the part, and watched a documentary about lions to portray Billy's animalistic nature.
- Aisha Tyler was cast as Detective Jessica Wallis, a part that had originally been written as a 50-year-old male detective.
- In 2022 Wan confirmed on Instagram that Death Sentence was his last movie as director to be shot on traditional celluloid photochemical film; barring a few scenes for Furious 7, he shifted to digital photography from Insidious onwards.
- Garfield liked that, unlike the Death Wish film series, the film does not advocate vigilantism, saying that except for its ludicrous violence toward the end it depicts its character's decline, and that as a story it made the point he wanted it to make.
