With Straw Dogs, director Rod Lurie unleashes the latest in a string of unnecessary Hollywood remakes which transform classic films into cookie-cutter crowd-pleasers. This recent batch of so-called "reinterpretations" and "updates" offers nothing new or notable to the world of cinema. In fact, most of the past decade's remakes have done little more than waste A-list talent and reduce complex cinematic meditations to the level of shallow silliness. Sadly, Straw Dogs seems content to carry on this trend of toothless filmmaking.
In Lurie's film, Hollywood screenwriter David Sumner and his wife, Amy, move into Amy's childhood home in the Deep South. The young lovers plan to sell the house quickly and carry on with their lives in L.A., but the situation becomes shaky as Charlie, one of Amy's former flings, begins to taunt, harass and ultimately assault the newlyweds. At this point, the film descends into the realm of a typical violent action thriller.
Sadly, Lurie's Straw Dogs makes a heavy-handed mess out of most of its scenes. Unlike Sam Peckinpah's 1971 original, which presented audiences with a crew of suitably sinister English villagers as its antagonists, Lurie's film merely delivers a cast of red-neck stereotypes and a surprisingly dull Southern landscape. Even Alexander Skarsgard's effective turn as the vicious Charlie does little to create any sense of suspense or horror. The movie does at least contain strong performances by James Marsden as David and Kate Bosworth as Amy, however. Both leads deserve much better material than this hollow shell of a movie.
For good reason, remakes like Straw Dogs have inspired mostly grimaces and groans throughout the last decade. Remakes weren't always notoriously bad, however. In fact, in the 1950s, film remakes became a cinematic staple and an audience favorite. For instance, in 1956, director Cecil DeMille swept audiences away when he lavishly remade his own 1923 Biblical epic, The Ten Commandments. DeMille's remake, which enlisted substantial star power and colorful film stock, earned him both Oscar nominations and box office success. While the 1923 original has vanished into obscurity, the film's 1956 version still attracts viewers today. Similarly, certain films remade in the '50s and '60s by Alfred Hitchcock and Leo McCarey, among others, have far surpassed their original sources in both financial grosses and critical acclaim.
Unfortunately, this trend of successful Hollywood remakes and rehashes came to a halt as directors began to pick up projects that neither needed nor warranted any sort of re-imagining or updating. For example, Stanley Kramer's 1967 masterpiece, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?, which explored different generational attitudes toward issues of race, hardly demanded a transformation into the wretched Bernie Mac vehicle which bore a shortened version of its name in 2005. Like 2005's The Bad News Bears, 2010's The Karate Kid and 2011's Arthur, Guess Who? took a classic film which corresponded to a particular period in time and placed it, without real purpose, in a dull 21st century framework.
Fortunately though, despite the recent slew of silly slasher movie remakes and pointless rehashes, a small handful of directors persists in putting forth fresh and wonderful new takes on films which fall outside of the realm of mainstream contemporary cinema. Director Cameron Crowe proved worthy of this category of filmmakers in 2001, when he remade the 1997 Spanish film Open Your Eyes as a sweeping blockbuster called Vanilla Sky. Even though Alejandro Amen
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