While Foster's character turns vigilante in "The Brave One" — albeit not as indiscriminately as the Bronson character in "Death Wish" — Kevin Bacon's mild-mannered father in "Death Sentence" takes aim only at those who have gone after his wife and sons.

Those bad guys are a gang of drug dealers who rampage and kill unimpeded. But Wan, the 30-year-old director of "Death Sentence," said he saw his evildoers as a metaphor for other things that are causing people to feel powerless to protect themselves.

"There's a lot of these wars we're fighting that we're not really sure why we're doing it, and family members are dying because of things overseas, and we all feel like we're losing control, in a way that we haven't been used to in a long time," Wan said in an interview at an out-of-the-way Beverly Hills hotel bar. "The '80s and '90s were times when we were complacent, when we took a lot of things for granted. And now that we see that things can be taken away so easily, I think deep down we want to take some of the control back."

Wan said he injected a dose of social relevance as a way of protecting himself. "I knew that in making a revenge movie, the critics out there would already be sharpening their weapons," he said. Suicide bombings in the news gave him his theme: the unending cycle of violence. Bacon, for his part, said that he signed up to star in "Death Sentence" because "I really wanted to just jump around and shoot some guns" but discovered that the film had unexpected depth.

"He answers violence with violence, it spins out of control, and he can't stop it," he said of his character, who undergoes a Travis Bickle-like metamorphosis from businessman to revenge killer, complete with a self-administered Mohawk, but falls well short of achieving satisfaction.

"One aspect that James and I were very specific about was, yeah, we have a movie that's an action movie, a genre-thriller-action movie," Bacon said. "But at the end you don't see the hero step out into the sunlight and the music swells and he's triumphed. He really is broken. Everything he cares about he has destroyed by picking up a sword."

Intriguingly, "Death Sentence" places Bacon's family in an idyllic suburb just a short drive from a hellish urban no man's land. The movie was shot in Columbia, S.C., of all places, and Wan said it took considerable set-dressing to create a convincingly grungy ghetto.

But one of Wan's producers, Ashok Amritraj, said that the proximity of serene suburb to violent badlands required no suspension of disbelief. Amritraj, whose Hyde Park Entertainment is also developing the "Star Chamber" remake, said that falling national crime statistics ignored the many places — whether in cities like Newark, N.J., or the suburban and rural areas where gangs have spread — that violent crime still has the capacity to terrorize.

That nearness to danger stems less from an inept justice system, he said, than from the social polarization that's continuing unabated, not only in the United States but also worldwide.

"The rich are getting richer, while at the same time the way cities are these days, you're just two miles away from a possible slum or gangbangers," Amritraj said. "It's not like Beverly Hills is impenetrable. One mile away you run into a problem, and your life has changed."