The upcoming remake of the 1974 revenge thriller Death Wish just added two television tough guys to a cast that already includes a longtime Hollywood action hero.
Daredevil actor Vincent D’Onofrio (pictured above) and Breaking Bad actor Dean Norris have reportedly joined previously announced star Bruce Willis in director Eli Roth’s remake of the film about a man whose quest for vengeance turns him into a deadly vigilante. The film will reportedly follow the plot of Brian Garfield’s 1972 novel of the same name more closely than the original film and its four sequels, all of which starred Charles Bronson.
According to Deadline, D’Onofrio (who plays the criminal kingpin Wilson Fisk in Marvel’s Daredevil series) will play the brother of Willis’ character and Norris will play a character named Detective Rains — which should be a fairly smooth transition for the actor, who played DEA agent Hank Schrader on AMC’s Breaking Bad.
The original Death Wish movie cast Bronson as a New York City architect whose wife and daughter are brutally attacked by gang members. He embarks on a personal quest for revenge after the police are unable to catch the perpetrators of the crime. Although the film and its sequels did relatively well at the box office (with diminishing returns with each installment), Garfield famously dismissed the movies for their pro-vigilantism stance, which contradicted the theme of his novel. He later penned a sequel to his original novel, Death Sentence, which further articulated his anti-vigilantism message. It was eventually adapted for the screen in 2007 — Kevin Bacon starred in the movie of the same name from director James Wan.
Along with Roth (Hostel) in the director’s chair, the Death Wish remake features a script initially penned by Joe Carnahan (The Grey), Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler), and Graham Yost (Justified), and later revised by Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski (The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story).
There’s no release date set for the film at this point.
