10 Surprisingly Good Scenes In Otherwise Terrible Movies

James Wan's Death Sentence was a major leap for the filmmaker and screenwriter Leigh Whannel, trying to shift from the genre from which they so boldly made their name when Saw debuted. It also had a long, possibly unknown history for viewers, given that it was adapted from author Brian Garfield's sequel to Death Wish - the film version of which the author despised.

While Wan borrows a few elements from Garfield's novel, it largely ignores the thrust of the plot, serving as its own loose remake of the Bronson film before Eli Roth ended up screwing the pooch there, too.

There is, however, one spectacular chase scene. After NIck Hume (Kevin Bacon) loses his son to a brutal gang initiation and starts to hunt them down, they try to take him out, leading to a several block-long chase scene that winds up at the top of a parking garage in a car slowly reversing toward the back edge, the two passengers fighting. Bacon manages to leap out just as the car topples over the side. It serves as a fine reminder why Saw is more a thriller than pure torture porn, as Wan can still direct the hell out of a complex set-piece based on machinations.

Outside of that fine-staged sequence of suspense, Wan is only interested in amping the action to 11 and muddying the waters of morality to an unforgivably silly degree.