10 Movie Heroes Who Made Everything Worse

It's probably an understatement to say that the Death Wish franchise has aged like milk over the years, beginning as a gritty revenge thriller in which architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) becomes a gun-totting vigilante in order to avenge his wife's murder and daughter's rape.

But the sequels slid increasingly into uneasy Republican power fantasy territory, serving as disconcerting propaganda for America's much-cherished right to bear arms.

This borders on self-parody in later sequels when Kersey is basically setting up scenarios to invite the presence of criminals - who are given the dehumanising, all-encompassing label "creeps" - providing him with the seemingly legal opportunity to blow them away.

And yet, has society ever proven that straight-up murdering criminals is a successful deterrent? Almost a half-century after the franchise began, the answer is very clearly no.

While Kersey's efforts to "clean up the streets" were largely in vain, there's an argument to be made that he also made our own reality worse, by selling the much-parroted lie to millions of moviegoers that the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is with a "good" guy with a gun.

Unsurprisingly, 2018's Bruce Willis-starring remake curdled before it even landed in cinemas.