Vigilante revenge flicks are kind of my thing. I like the idea of a good guy being wronged and taking matters into his own hands. Whether it’s stylistic (“Kill Bill”), over the top (“The Punisher”) or shockingly realistic (“Man on Fire”), as long as the movie involves one person shaping his own destiny rather than relegating the task to a faceless court system, I find it intriguing.

You can imagine my excitement, then, when I first heard about “Death Sentence.” Kevin Bacon plays a middle-class father whose son is murdered in a fit of senseless gang violence. When the courts fail to imprison the wrongdoer, Bacon is forced to gear up and dole out some punishment of his own.

The problem with this movie is that nearly every aspect of it is a lie. For the first 20 minutes, things seem to be going smoothly. The tone is serious, and the dialogue sounds natural. It’s when the action starts to heat up that the movie reveals itself for what it truly is — a slasher film. Even that wouldn’t be too terrible if it were properly executed, but the way the tone shifts is incredibly awkward.

Without revealing too much, what should have been a short evasion with Bacon dodging a gang member turns into a far too long chase sequence that is neither exciting nor believable. Every time Bacon got in a fight, I kept wondering how this graying corporate risk analyst was able to go toe-to-toe with ripped and vicious thugs. Most movies of this type would have some sort of training sequence where the hero gains the skills necessary to fight his enemy. The director of “Death Sentence” seems to have overlooked this detail.

Even so, it’s not unreasonable to ask for a little suspension of disbelief, something I would have been more than willing to grant were the rest of the movie not equally ridiculous. Halfway through the film, the dialogue plummeted to the point where every time a character opened his mouth, I would instinctively cringe.

The story tries too hard to add extra elements to a simple revenge tale, making it feel bloated and unnecessary. A clich?© subplot involving the younger son feeling overshadowed by the dead older one comes out of nowhere, making for an awkward scene ending with the father cursing out his own son. Continuing this trend of misfires, the melodramatic music feels out of place in every scene. The opposite is also true, and sometimes, like during the chase mentioned above, I was aware of a lack of music and wondered what had happened to it.

In every sense of the word, “Death Sentence” is a mistake. It’s difficult to sympathize with the characters, the plot twists don’t work, and technical limitations, such as the music and strange cinematography, make it impossible to extract any enjoyment from the botched fight scenes.

Forget the gang members. Whoever gave this movie the green light deserves some serious capital punishment.