On "Messenger Of Death"

I returned to the VHS format after a brief foray into online streaming, and the film that took me back was "Messenger Of Death", one of about forty different movies on the theme of vigilante violence which pair Charles Bronson and director J. Lee Thompson in a Cannon production. In this one, Bronson plays a Denver newspaper reporter who investigates an apparent blood feud between two Mormon families.

Bronson ordinarily plays the regular guy (or the cop) who must take matters into his own hands when the system fails to adequately punish those who have wronged him and his family. Little of that is true here. The film opens with a grisly crime and then settles into a low-octane investigation of the parties involved in the aforementioned feud. Bronson only took a firearm into his hands once by my account, and not to menace a person.

Bronson also doesn't lose any family members. He evidently doesn't have any family members, and has nothing in the way of a love interest either. He does attend some parties and dinners with a co-worker, but anything that would have developed with her is undercut when Bronson leaves Denver and spends time with a different female journalist out in the country. It's a puzzling choice to have made, I have to say.

The film has some appeal. There are one or two interesting performances. One of the Mormon patriarchs is fun to watch. One of the high society Denver power brokers involved in the film's mayoral campaign subplot is kind of neat. The film's crude examination of Mormon culture is an interesting look back in time to when the rest of us knew even less about them than we do now. The Colorado scenery is awfully nice to look at.

Balancing the good against the bad, I'd say this one came out ahead, but not by a ton. The thing I'll remember most stands as a reminder of what resources they must have been working with on this production. If you ask me, you can get away with shooting somebody in the chest or one of the extremities and not having any blood. That can be handled so that it's not a liability. When you have a guy shoot himself in the head in a close-up, however, you just have to have some gore.

I don't have to have gore in a movie any more than I have to have a guy killing himself in the first place, but if you're bound and determined to do it, you had better do it right. The fact that they couldn't do that but decided they'd go ahead anyway is an unfortunate demerit for a film that otherwise was a perfectly reasonable example of late Bronson. I'll forgive them that one, but I sure can't forget it, I'm afraid.