In a film that excels in manipulating even the most docile audience into wanting blood, Bronson plays a kindly architect who turns into a vigilante when his family is brutally attacked. Bronson and his wife Lange come home from an idyllic Hawaiian vacation to their home in New York City (the contrast is more than obvious, with a practically hellish depiction of The Big Apple here) and have barely unpacked before a trio of thugs assaults Lange and her daughter Tolan. Bronson tries to find a way to live with the injustice of it all, but eventually is awakened to the lure of gun ownership by a trigger-happy associate he meets during an extended business trip to Arizona. Having endured and witnessed all the crime he can tolerate, Bronson sets out to lure criminals into attacking him so that he can blow them away. Meanwhile, police detective Gardinia and his fellow officers try to locate the vigilante, whose string of killings has caught the media's attention and turned him into a celebrity, albeit an unknown one. Eventually, Bronson finds himself risking personal injury from his prey as the authorities close in on him, though they aren't even sure what to do with him since, thanks to him, crime has dropped considerably! Bronson isn't perhaps the most obvious choice to play a pacifistic architect, but he is, of course, right at home when it comes to the vengeful aspects of the character. He's always cool as a cucumber, stoically (detractors might say woodenly) enticing the dregs of the city into his gun sites. Just as the character he plays caught on with the media in the film, Bronson's star rose significantly after this film, which was a runaway hit (whose prestige was diminished a tad by a later quartet of horrendous sequels.) Lange (along with Tolan) has to endure a gut-wrenchingly savage attack, which, even today, is chilling to view. Something about that 70s camera-work makes these things look even more disturbing than today's filmmakers are capable of producing. Gardenia hams it up a bit as the dogged detective with a perpetual cold, but he's a good counterpoint to Bronson. (He shares some screen time with Dukakis, as a policewoman, who would later play his wife in "Moonstruck" and take home an Oscar!) Keats, as Tolan's husband, tries just a little too hard to engender familial bonds with Bronson and comes off as quite whiny. One could destroy a calculator trying to count how many times he says "Dad" to his father-in-law Bronson. "The Rockford Files" fans will get a kick out of seeing Margolin as the gun-totin' associate of Bronson's. His car is quite a sight, too. Many familiar 70s TV and movie faces pop up along the way including a nearly unrecognizable Guest as a cop, Jacobs as a mugger and Goldblum as one of the deranged thugs who start the whole sick ball rolling. It is, for the most part, a bleak, rather disturbing film, but, for those along for the ride, it's also somewhat cathartic in that it allows the viewer to vicariously get back at those who break the law and have no regard for others' feelings, property or wellbeing. On the flip side, there is some amusingly heinous décor in Bronson's high-rise apartment. This might take the cake as the all-time fugliest cinema kitchen! Also, Bronson appears briefly in a speedo, for those who like that sort of thing. Herbie Hancock's busy score is a matter of taste.