Death Wish II is a 1982 American vigilante action-thriller film directed and co-edited by Michael Winner. It is the first of four sequels to the 1974 film Death Wish. It is the second installment in the Death Wish film series. In the story, architect Paul Kersey (Charles Bronson) moves to Los Angeles with his daughter (Robin Sherwood). After his daughter is murdered at the hands of several gang members, Kersey once again chooses to become a vigilante. Unlike the original, in which he hunts down every criminal he encounters, Kersey only pursues his family's attackers. The sequel makes a complete breakaway from the Brian Garfield novels Death Wish and Death Sentence, redefining the Paul Kersey character. It was succeeded by Death Wish 3.

Plot

Roughly eight years since the events of the first film, Paul Kersey has managed to recover from his shattered life and moved on and is now living in Los Angeles and working as a freelance architect. One of his clients is a close friend who owns a radio station for whom he is designing a new building and he is also dating one of its reporters, Geri Nichols. They go to pick up Paul's daughter, Carol, from the mental hospital. They spend the afternoon at a fairground, where Paul's wallet is stolen by a gang, consisting of Nirvana, Punkcut, Stomper, Cutter, and Jiver. The gang splits up when Paul chases them; he goes to pursue Jiver, whom he corners in an alley but lets the hood go after Jiver tells Paul that he does not have the wallet. The gang finds Paul's home address in his wallet and later breaks into his house. They gag and restrain Rosario, Paul's housekeeper, then they began taking turns raping her. When Paul arrives home with his daughter, he is beaten unconscious. Rosario tries to call the police, but Nirvana kills her with his crowbar. They kidnap Carol and take her to their hideout, where one of the gang members rapes her. Carol attempts to escape by running through a plate-glass window, falls onto an iron fence, and is fatally impaled. When the police arrive, Lieutenant Mankewicz asks for help identifying the muggers, but Paul refuses. After Carol's funeral, he takes his Beretta Model 84 handgun to a low-rent inner-city hotel as a base of operations. The next evening, he observes and follows Stomper into an abandoned building as a drug deal is about to be made. Paul shoots one of the dealers and orders the others out before he shoots Stomper twice. The following night, he hears screams from a couple being assaulted in a parking garage by four muggers, which includes Jiver. Paul kills two rapists and wounds Jiver. Paul then follows Jiver's blood trail into an abandoned warehouse and, after briefly recalling his initial encounter with and bidding him "goodbye", kills him.