A couple years after director Lewis Teague and screenwriter
John Sayles first appeared on the crime horror scene with the 1980 creature
feature Alligator and right before diving even further into horror with
not one but two Stephen King projects Cujo and Cat’s Eye, the
director teamed up with Death Wish producer Dino De Laurentiis to do
another riff on the vigilante street justice revenge action thriller with Fighting
Back.
Released shortly after the far
more controversial and morally dubious Death Wish II (unproduced by
Laurentiis incidentally), the film is an underrated, far classier and more
nuanced answer to the bevy of vigilante films coming out of Death Wish’s
wake. At once an action thriller while
also being a satirical social critique that leaves its audience with much to
process when its over with, Fighting Back serves as a testament to Lewis
Teague’s versatility as a director, taking on serious genre fare in between his
fantasy horror projects while serving forward complex, realistic characters
that aren’t totally all black-and-white good or evil.
With the police not doing much
to curtail the violence, John takes a stand and forms with other regular citizens
fed up with the crime a coalition known as the People’s Neighborhood Patrol or
PNP for short. Taking matters into their
own hands donning uniforms and working in conjunction with the police including
best friend officer Vince Morelli (Michael Sarrazin), tensions in the city
escalate as John becomes heroized in the court of public opinion as he turns,
before our eyes, more and more into a fascistic monster.
Touching on a variety of social issues of the day including but
not limited to racial discrimination and political chicanery, featuring an
unlikely onscreen reunion of Tom Skerritt and fellow Alien actor Yaphet
Kotto as Ivanhoe who is leading his own black vigilante mob and rightly points
out the racism of John’s character, Fighting Back unlike the Michael
Winner vigilante films before it seems to be poking sly fun at the
situation.
As John’s stature in the area
as a pillar of the community ascends, unscrupulous politicians eager to seize
the moment and steal a bit of his thunder start making him offers of potential
leadership. All the while he grows
further estranged from his wife as his own sense of right and wrong becomes
increasingly blurred if not tainted and after awhile were not sure who the real
criminals are anymore.
Penned by Thomas Hedley Jr. (Flashdance) and Straw Dogs screenwriter David Z. Goodman, shot handsomely by Four Flies on Grey Velvet cinematographer Franco Di Giamono and scored by legendary Italian composer Piero Piccioni, Fighting Back is a bit hard to pin down tonally as it both addresses the gravity of crime on the general public as well as satirizing how people respond to it.
On
the one hand it presents violence begetting violence in an all-out brawl, on
the other hand it is rather tongue in cheek about it. Unlike Death Wish or much more
recently Nobody which invites you to laugh with the righter of wrongs, Fighting
Back while clearly fond of the film’s hero also at times pokes fun at his
unfolding dilemma.
Much of the film’s strength stems from Tom Skerritt who,
after playing the wishy-washy mild-mannered Captain Dallas in Alien becomes
a bull who is set off by the slightest hair trigger. Seeing him go into white hot rages and
becoming something of a surrogate town leader wasn’t something I was used to
seeing from Skerritt.
Also very
understated is Michael Sarrazin as his cop best friend Vince who wants to help
but finds himself between a rock and a hard place as the local police
commissioner starts tightening the belt on John’s vigilantism. Alien fans will get wide eyed over
Yaphet Kotto’s cameo as another vigilante justice warrior who can’t help but poke
holes in the “integrity” of what John and his PNP group are really doing.
A tragic underperformer at the box office being overshadowed
by the more openly crass and exploitative Death Wish II, Fighting
Back was met with mixed reception as some claimed it glorified vigilantism
while others saw it as a snarky rebuke.
Looking at it now it is hard to tell who the villains are and how the tyranny
of vigilantism corrupts those wielding it once they’ve acquired a taste for
power.
John D’Angelo and his PNP group
might be cleaning up the town but they’ve soiled their souls in the process,
becoming the very thing they aspire to hate and fear. By the time our antiheroic antagonist drunk
on power has more or less avenged himself, were really not sure if he can go
back to being his old self or whether or not he’s simply added to the problem
instead of resolution. The streets are
clean, but are they really?
--Andrew Kotwicki
