The trailer for Eli Roth’s revival of the action franchise has been accused of being ‘nakedly fascist’ in its story of vigilanteism in a volatile Chicago

There is a long and fine tradition of pointing out that Eli Roth’s new films don’t look very good. The cocksure writer, director, producer and sometime actor has spent the last 15 years serving up reliably polarising product from the gloomy, insidious torture-porn of Hostel to the garish sexpot thriller Knock Knock. Roth’s latest and most high-profile project – a long-in-the-works resurrection of the Death Wish franchise with Bruce Willis as the trigger-happy lead – has attracted even sharper criticism than usual. The launch trailer has sustained heavy fire on social media, called out for being “nakedly fascist” and being compared to “alt-right fan fiction”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Willis in Death Wish. Photograph: MGM

To mix animal metaphors, the trailer does make the rebooted Death Wish look like a depressing frog chorus of alt-right dog whistles. The setting has been shifted from New York to Chicago, a city currently struggling in real life to cope with a resurgent murder rate while being attacked by Donald Trump on a weekly basis. The alt-right like to paint the US’s third largest city as an urban hellscape overrun by predominantly black gangs fighting for turf. Purists might point to the fact that the new film’s location is paying tribute to Michael Winner’s 1974 original, which ends with Charles Bronson arriving at Chicago’s Union Station to continue his vigilante campaign. By fully setting their remake in Chicago, however, Roth and his producers are wading into real-life racial tensions (while filming mostly in Montreal).

The remake appears to stick to the man-on-the-edge premise of the original. Willis plays an affluent, middle-aged surgeon whose wife and daughter are victims of a savage home invasion. With the cops and courts seemingly incapable of punishing the perpetrators, Willis swaps scrubs for a hoodie to enforce his own brand of guerrilla justice, torturing low-life criminals in pursuit of information, gunning down a black drug dealer in broad daylight and, it is implied, becoming a folk hero in the process.

You might suppose that a film about a medical professional so psychologically upended by anger and grief that they become a murderer could be the basis for a thought-provoking meditation on how we construct our own morality in a volatile world. Roth’s film, judging by its trailer, chooses to go in a rather different direction, with Willis quipping his way through a montage of violent kills over an AC/DC soundtrack. The strutting Back in Black is prominent on the soundtrack of Iron Man, and the suggestion seems to be that, like libertarian billionaire Tony Stark, Willis’ Paul Kersey is a maverick hero with no time for liberal hand-wringers. Roth initially seemed happy to stoke the flames, promoting the trailer with some macho lock and load talk and the social justice warrior baiting #triggerwarning hashtag.

Eli Roth (@eliroth) Cocked, locked, ready to rock! The @DeathWishMovie trailer is HERE! Blasting into theaters 11/22. Watch. Rinse. Retweet. #triggerwarning pic.twitter.com/p6qosdh8WK

Could Roth deliberately be courting the alt-right dollar? His 2015 jungle cannibal movie The Green Inferno received some unexpectedly admiring notices from pro-Trump publisher Breitbart, who seemed tickled that the gnawed-on victims were students whose conservation activism was a pose. But despite his crass creative impulses and glib comments, Roth is an unlikely cheerleader for the alt-right. He makes a searing screen appearance in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds as Donny Donowitz, a second world war soldier who goes a little further than just punching Nazis. The formidable “Bear Jew” specialises in clubbing them to death with a baseball bat.

In truth, Roth seems more of an equal opportunities controversialist who views himself as a gonzo cinematic provocateur rather than propagandist. When recently confronted about the Death Wish reaction, he claimed to be proud of the final product. “When people see the movie in context I think this [controversy] is all going to evaporate,” he said. Like the Rambo franchise, the original Death Wish series began with downbeat, thorny, unsettling films before rapidly becoming exaggerated cartoons. Judging by the way Willis jokes and smirks in the trailer, Roth seems to have internalised the spirit of the 1980s sequels, citing Death Wish 3 as a key inspiration. That was the one where lethal architect Charles Bronson returned to “New York City” – which looked suspiciously like London – and ended up taking out punks with silly Home Alone-style booby traps.

Irrespective of Roth’s intentions, Death Wish still seems likely to be embraced by right-wing activists in the run-up to its November release, if only because it has already enraged so many liberal commentators. In the alt-right’s culture war, opportunistic points-scoring is more useful than cogent debate, and anything that draws fire from “snowflakes” is seen as good. That this latest ammunition has come from Hollywood itself – traditionally a liberal stronghold – will make it all the more appealing to dudes who fantasise about white men taking charge through violence.

Still, at least Roth can claim to have honoured the original Death Wish in his own weird way. The Michael Winner original was also greeted as dangerously right-wing agitprop in 1974, which the New York Times called “a bird-brained movie to cheer the hearts of the far-right wing”.