Rated R for strong brutal violence including a sexual attack, menace, some sexual content, and pervasive language
Cast: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard, James Woods, Dominic Purcell
Director: Rod Lurie
Just about all remakes are unnecessary. This one left me perplexed. Why now? And why this particular film? I ask this not because Sam Peckinpah's 1971 original "Straw Dogs" was a masterpiece, but because it wasn't.
The original was (in my opinion) one of Peckinpah's less effective films hampered not by its depiction of senseless violence, but by its nonsensical character motivation. Meaningful movies can be made about brutality (i.e. Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch") but when characters engage in brutal acts solely because a screenplay needs them to, it makes it harder to locate a meaning behind the violence.
Both the original and this remake end with a young couple trapped in their house encircled by a slew of heavily-intoxicated thugs bent on getting in. All the men are perfectly willing to die in order to get inside. I am reminded of Roger Ebert's query regarding the 1971 original, where he wondered how each of these men could be drunk enough to entertain such a thought process yet be sober enough to do something about it. I guess we’re supposed to look beyond such queries and simply contemplate the dark side of human nature. It’s a filmmaking truth, however, that bending plausibility too much impacts any potential meaning. We buy the villains as loutish thugs with miniscule social skills, but not kamikaze warriors willing to die in order to satisfy a little bout of bloodlust. The third act (in both films) feels too staged.
Dustin Hoffman’s mathematician in the original has been replaced with James Marsden’s screenwriter this time around. The story opens with David Sumner (Marsden) and his actress wife, Amy (Kate Bosworth in the Susan George role) relocating to Amy’s hometown of Blackwater , Mississippi Deep South will afford him the chance to complete his latest screenwriting endeavor. To “make good” with the locals, David unwisely offers a construction contract to Amy’s childhood love, Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard) who still houses a torch for her. The locals collectively dislike David's fancy car, upscale attire, intellectual background and the mere fact that he's an outsider. It’s not long before Charlie’s crew make themselves unwelcome in the couple's life, going so far as to leer at a sweat-drenched Amy as she jogs and helping themselves to all manner of food and beer in their home, all while performing actual work only a few hours each day. Their actions drive a wedge between David, with his mild-mannered approach to conflict resolution, and Amy, who wishes he’d put his foot down and set the ground rules.
The remake follows the original pretty closely, which merely adds to my bewilderment. The director is Rod Lurie, whose “The Contender” remains one of my favorite political dramas. I’m not sure exactly what he was going for here, or what he expected in terms of reactions from his audience. My objections to this film pretty much mirror my objections to the original… the crescendo of third act violence felt too forced, and I just didn’t know what to take away from it. What, that human nature has a dark side? Yeah, I think that notion is pretty solidly entrenched in the field of common knowledge.
As far as the cast goes, Kate Bosworth comes off as the most credible, playing a woman at varying odds with both her ambivalent feelings toward the attitudes of certain townfolk and the perceived judgments of her “upper-class” spouse. Marsden is okay, though we never really sense he’s reached his breaking point (as the ads suggest); his retaliatory actions seem like offspring of final act screenplay machinations. The script seems to want to make Charlie more complex than your average thug, but Alexander Skarsgard looks confused in the role… as though he’s striving to understand the varying reactions he’s asked to portray. The supporting players exist more for atmosphere than credibility, including an over-the-top James Woods as the high school’s former football coach who now bullies local law enforcement, and a miscast Dominic Purcell as an intellectually-stunted outcast who once “made a mistake” with a girl and now lives under a cloud of suspicion.
As I was leaving the theatre, I overhead a group of twenty-somethings laughing and commenting on how “totally cool” the violence was. Such notions invite judgment, but a more somber thought took hold of my psyche… I wondered what else (if anything) did the filmmakers expect from the viewer? Nothing came to mind.
* * out of * * * * stars
