See you and raise you, motherfucker

Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver ain't got nothing on this guy. Nick Hume, well-played as a regular dad by Kevin Bacon, basically wanders into the middle of a bunch of gang bangers (fortunately a mixed-race gang; this isn't about race, it's about power) and gets his son killed in a gas station robbery/gang initiation. That's bad. But when he goes to court to testify against the one guy they caught, he decides to do some case-nullification, and blows the ID. The judge has no choice but to let the guy go. Things get worse from there.
In the end, the bad guys show up and shoot everyone. Amazingly (this is the 'gang that couldn't shoot straight'), Nick lives, as does his other son. His wife (well played by the good-looking Kelly Preston) unfortunately dies. Nick goes, predictably, ballistic and hunts down the remainder of the gang in a really nasty, dark housing complex and there's the obligatory long, drawn-out shoot-out in the last half hour or so of the film.
The whole problem here, unfortunately, is that poor Nick (until it's far too late) never held a gun in his life. (This is made obvious by his clumsy dropping-bullets moves when he finally breaks down and gets some guns.) I would call this film a great recruiting poster for the NRA and concealed-carry permits (plus some gun training, too; Nick chooses a hammered double shotgun as his main weapon of choice. Good gun for cowboy action shooting, bad gun for urban shootouts). If Nick had been carrying anything bigger than a popgun at the beginning of the film, it would have been over before it started, and his whole family would have been alive. (And Nick would not, as he undoubtedly did by the end of the film, go to jail for his well-meaning vigilante actions.) But that's not the movie the director chose to make, nor did Brian Garfield write the original book that way. But when you look at Garfield's film bio and realize that he wrote all the Death Wish books and movies, you begin to understand where this story came from. (He also wrote the novel behind The Last Hard Men, a good Western equivalent where Charlton Heston has to take down a gang who've kidnapped his daughter out of revenge for his putting them in jail years earlier.)
All in all, a good movie. Some of it is tough to watch, but it's very well made, and Kevin Bacon is very good as a good man driven to do bad things. The bad guys, of course, are a touch stylized (a lot of heavy tattoos, stupid behavior, the usual), but what did you want, sympathetic bad guys?
Spoiler: John Goodman plays the wacko illicit gun dealer who sells the guns to Nick that solve his problem; he's also the father of one of the bad guys. End of spoiler
There's some clumsy gun-handling in it, because most of Hollywood don't know shit about guns, but at least there was nothing egregiously stupid. The effects were good, if you like shotguns blowing holes in things and people falling down with blood coming out of them. I'd see it again, not right away (too depressing), but eventually. If you don't mind a good revenge movie, you should go see it, or rent it when it goes to DVD. If you hate violence (even well-deserved violence), don't go see this one.