“Death Wish” used to be a good name but it has definitely run out of steam when a sequel like this comes out. “Death Wish V: The Face Of Death” is one of the dumbest title I’ve ever heard for a film and it’s such a bland film that nobody, even the most die-hard fans I going to want to see.

In “Death Wish V”, architect/vigilante Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson “Death Wish”, “Dirty Dozen”) is back with a new girlfriend (Lesley-Ann Down “The Great Train Robbery”) and you know the formula: she dies, Kersey kills some bad guys and that’s it. Gone is the power of the early films and gone is the humour of the later ones, “Death Wish V” is a dark film that goes by the numbers and is completely forgettable.

Paul Kersey turns to explosive footballs and acid pools to make his kills but here it’s done without any enthusiasm; actor Charles Bronson looks so incredibly bored here. The bad guys here are awful, one permanently has a lollipop sticking out of his mouth, one has high blood pressure and one suffers from bad dandruff; not exactly threatening, are they? The love interest is just there to die.

“Death Wish V” recycles so much and does it without any precision that it becomes increasingly challenging to find something good here. I like its return to the more harsh and disturbing tone of the older films but it abandons the sense of sophistication that made those movies work; it’s sinister and ugly as opposed to grizzly yet clever. There isn’t even a high body count to entertain viewers who simply wish to see corpses stack, in fact Paul Kersey kills less people here than he does in the first film. “Death Wish V” is a movie that should have been disposed of the moment pen was put to paper.