Just let this sleeping dog lie.
The H-Bomb: Young, dull newlyweds David (James Marsden) and Amy (Kate Bosworth) move from L.A. to the small southern town where Amy grew up. David is a screenwriter, and he hopes that the peace and quiet of their isolated farm house will be the perfect place to work on his script. Unfortunately for him, the local hillbillies they hired to fix up the barn roof have other ideas. It’s bad enough that David is an outsider and a city boy with a condescending, intellectual air to him, but the fact that he hired Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), Amy’s old high school beau, to work on the roof only makes matters worse. See, Charlie still has an eye for Amy, and he doesn’t much care for her running off and marrying this nerdy little Joe Hollywood douche bag, so… I think you can guess where this is going.
Charlie and his buddies’ taunts start out as minor annoyances; showing up to work at the crack of dawn with their shit-kicker music blasting, walking into David’s house uninvited and just helping themselves to whatever’s in his fridge, cutting out at midday to go hunting, so on and so forth. Being that David is a product of the Left Coast and a very principled pacifist (so he tells us), he is willing to turn the other cheek and try not to let it get to him.
But Charlie’s antics soon escalate and become more hostile and dangerous; David is run off the road by their truck, pet cats turn up dead (why does that sound familiar), and eventually a vicious assault takes place. If David and Amy had even an iota of common sense, they would just cut their losses and leave, but David isn’t about to be driven out of his home, and he now has a lot of manning up to do before the inevitable violent showdown.
You’d think after the dismal failure that was the “The Getaway” remake, that Hollywood would know better than to redo Sam Peckinpah, the guns n’ booze auteur who had an arresting, kick-to-the-dick style that no one could ever replicate, but that didn’t stop them from trying. This time, they tried doing it with “Straw Dogs”, his 1971 film about a non-violent man pushed to the breaking point. It was mucho controversial when released, but it’s kind of tame by today’s standards.
For this remake, the setting has been changed from rural England to the rural U.S., and the main character’s profession has been switched, inconsequentially, from mathematician to screenwriter, but everything else follows the plot of the original to the letter. The result is a banal, quasi-boring film which adds nothing new to the story thematically, and ultimately has no reason whatsoever to exist. The graphic violence of the Peckinpah film is retained, including the infamous use of a bear trap, but the potency is gone.
Writer/Director Rod Lurie (“The Contender”, a putrid film) also didn’t do himself any favors by making all the small town folk a bunch of tobaccy chewin’, beer swilling, narrow minded primates who enjoy bullying and tormenting outsiders when they’re not too busy fucking their own relatives. It’s the kind of lame, clichéd small town stereotype that could only have been written by some snotty writer who has never actually been to a small town in his life.
I also love how Lurie has his protagonists say and do the most stupid, illogical things imaginable simply because the plot needs them to, like having the atheist David wax philosophical about religion with Charlie by calling God a “bully,” or having him say shit like, “I’m a writer, that means I work for a living” to a blue collar guy who actually does work for a living. Jesus, a fucking first grader would know better.
But the real kicker, the one that truly insults the intelligence, is what Lurie has Amy do after she catches Charlie and his slobbering goons eyeballing her; she opens her bedroom window and strips naked in front of them. Seriously, is this chick retarded?! What was she thinking? Can she even think? Does she even have a brain? Apparently, Lurie forgot to give her one.
Lurie also forgot to fix the one aspect of the 1971 film that, at least I think, doesn’t work, the reason for the final confrontation. It doesn’t come about from the simmering hatred that builds between David and Charlie, but from a subplot about the town retard who likes to touch children. It bothered me in the Peckinpah version, and it only added to my list of reasons to dislike the Lurie version.
Moving on to the performances, it’s a mixed bag. Marsden and Bosworth are reunited from “Superman Returns” and display the exact same lack of chemistry that they had in that film. They are both big zeros, and it should be noted that James Marsden is no Dustin Hoffman. Skarsgard (son of Stellan) is actually quite menacing and subtle as Charlie. His performance is one of the movie’s few virtues, and for a Swede, he made a pretty convincing redneck. James Woods is fun to watch as the alcoholic ex-high school football coach who also makes trouble for David and Amy. The only problem I had with him was that I didn’t believe for a second that he could actually intimidate an entire barroom full of good ol’ boys the way he does here.
(H-Man Parenthetical: I just remembered that Woods was also in “The Getaway” remake, as well. Weird.)
After all is said and done, this new “Straw Dogs” isn’t a terrible movie, it’s just a terribly pointless one. There’s nothing in here that Peckinpah didn’t already do better in his original film some forty years ago, and there is just no reason for this watered down, dumbed down version to have been made at all. If you must see “Straw Dogs”, do yourself a huge favor and watch the original, and give this future piece of K-Mart bargain bin fodder a pass.
