Kevin Bacon gives "Death Sentence" his all -- even shaving his head in his final transformation from middle-class insurance executive, doting dad and husband to crazed, hollow-eyed sharpshooter who wages war on the gangbangers who killed his older son.

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'Death Sentence'

• Director: James Wan.
• Starring: Kevin Bacon, Garrett Hedlund, Kelly Preston.
• Rating: R for strong bloody brutal violence and pervasive language.
• Web site: deathsentencemovie.com

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They blew a hole in a gas station clerk and turned a machete on the teenage Brendan (Stuart Lafferty), who had ducked inside while his father, Nick (Bacon), filled their car's tank in an unfamiliar, dodgy neighborhood. The pair had been on their way home from a hockey game when they unwittingly stumbled into a grisly initiation rite. Kill a stranger at random, get into the gang.

Nick identifies Brendan's murderer and is prepared to testify until he hears the killer's sentence may be only three to five years.

"You're using my son's death like some kind of card trick," he argues.

Nick changes his story, stalks the killer and -- in a move that takes even him by surprise -- stabs the thug to death. But that sets off a war, with the body count rising on each side, no way to call a truce and Nick's wife, Helen (Kelly Preston), and younger son, Lucas (Jordan Garrett), now in the crosshairs.

Like "Death Wish," the 1974 film starring Charles Bronson as an affluent architect who vows to avenge the death of his wife and rape of his daughter, "Death Sentence" is based on a Brian Garfield novel.

But the vigilante drama has been updated by screenwriter Ian Mackenzie Jeffers (this appears to be his sole credit) to account for widespread drug and gun dealing, gang violence, tattoos that crawl up the neck, shaved heads, plea bargains and cell phones.

"Death Sentence," directed by James Wan ("Saw"), is like a train that jumps the tracks.

By the time Bacon takes clippers to his scalp, speed-reads the instruction manuals for newly purchased guns, turns into an excellent marksman and converses with an recalcitrant stranger in Spanish, the cars have derailed, overturned and tumbled down the hillside. And spilled some fuel into a pristine river.

The cops are clueless or absent, the gang members often bathed in red light or holed up in an abandoned church, and Nick proves remarkably resilient for a desk jockey. He rebounds from injuries and executes some moves as if he were Jason Bourne, although casting Bacon rather than an action star such as a Bruce Willis gives the movie the Everyman it needs.

The cast also includes Garrett Hedlund as the gang leader, here unrecognizable from his roles in "Four Brothers" and the "Friday Night Lights" film; Aisha Tyler as a police detective; and John Goodman as a shadowy criminal.

The violence is ridiculously over the top. Gunplay erupts on a crowded city street. A man isn't just shot in the leg, his lower leg is shot off. And shells leave holes the size of basketball hoops in the wall.

The killings don't feel cathartic; they feel sickening and senseless. Having said all of that, Bacon is riveting throughout and if you forget how remarkable his transformation has been, you are reminded in a final scene.

You see the before and the after and the promise of what might have been -- and how it turned to ashes.