Review: Straw Dogs

in

Straw Dogs

As horror/thriller film fans, we must come to grips with the fact there will be remakes. There will be remakes of widely known horror movies, and there will even be remakes of the some of the more obscure films that we may hold more dear than the iconic films of the genre. It's always a pleasant surprise when these remakes turn out to be pleasant surprises that provide a fresh perspective and added nuances to the originals. It doesn't happen often nearly enough.

Straw Dogs, directed and co-written by Rod Lurie, is an example of a remake that is not a pleasant surprise, and that is a fact that shouldn't come as a surprise to any of the original Peckinpah classic film's fans. Not overall terrible, but when something like this is remade and is simply a halfway decent thriller with a bit of a misguided focus, why remake it in the first place?

David Sumner (James Marsden) and his wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) move to Amy's hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi where David can have some peace and quiet to work on his next screenplay and Amy can get back in touch with her roots. Tensions rise as some of the locals around town, particularly Charlie (Alexandar Skarsgard) and his group of cronies, begin to express their displeasure at David's unfamiliarity with the area.

On the surface, there are a lot of great pieces to this puzzle. In addition to the cast already named, Straw Dogs stars James Woods (Videodrome), Dominic Purcell (Prison Break) and Walton Goggins (The Shield), but it features far too little of them. Well, there might be a little too much of James Woods, but it's only too much because this may be one of his worst performances ever. Walton Goggins in particular is wrapped up in a storyline here that is confusing all-around and not necessary. It's just a shame that a film could cast someone as great as Goggins and not use him at all. Dominic Purcell's performance here looks as if his direction was to act (and look) like Steve Carell from Anchorman. Nonsensical performances overall make most of the film an odd head-scratcher.

The success or failure of the Straw Dogs remake with audiences will depend on the final act. Although that tends to bring up another problem with the film in that some of the events in the first two acts end up being fairly inconsequential despite the severity of the events themselves. Not only that, its focus is a bit off-putting. Fans of True Blood will no doubt recognize Alexander Skarsgard, and here just as on the show, he plays a pretty reprehensible villain, but fans won't care because of the way his character is shot, and this could make for a misguided audience (it certainly did at my screening).

Overall Straw Dogs has decent moments worthy of some of the best that home-invasion movies have to offer, but the greatness of its parts don't measure to up to the whole. Fans of the original will still love the original, and if anyone can call themselves a fan of this film, should absolutely seek out the original, if for nothing else than to see the product that Sam Peckinpah envisioned back in 1971 rather than the misguided movie this is.