What could be the ideal remake of a Sam Peckinpah (The Wild Bunch) semiclassic about an effete intellectual who’s pushed too far by a threat to his household? Because this version of Straw Dogs is the opposite of that.
The premise is simple: A pair of newlyweds relocates to the unsatisfied wife’s hometown — originally England, now the Deep South (Hicksploitation tests better than Anglophilia, apparently) — and tensions build as an ex-lover (Alexander Skarsgård, True Blood) threatens to undermine the marriage, eventually boiling over into intense violence.
It’s a simple formula — exploit sexual insecurity for suspense, then throw in a house-under-siege scene at the end — and while the film shows some promise in its first half, it too quickly descends into a “more is more” frenzy under the hand of director Rod Lurie (Nothing But the Truth), who never met a tortured metaphor he wasn’t willing to exploit.
The film’s flaws begin with the casting. While the protagonist, a mathematician in the original and a screenwriter here, was originally portrayed by Dustin Hoffman, the role is now held by the guy who played Cyclops in the X-Men movies (James Marsden).
Marsden is poorly miscast as a man of letters. He’s a smile and a chin, not an actor, and the replacement of a heavyweight like Hoffman with a pretty boy is indicative of the film’s desire to play it simple and (relatively) safe rather than challenge the audience.
On the other hand, Skarsgård, who was terrific in David Simon’s HBO miniseries Generation Kill, is excellent as the villain. He’s intermittently accented at best, but his icy, coiled charm and impressive physique make him a perfectly libidinous threat to Marsden’s marriage.
But the biggest flaw is that this is supposed to be a film about Marsden’s evolution from glasses-wearing girly man to gun-toting protector of his house, and he never sells the transformation — one minute he’s listening to Tchaikovsky, the next he’s shooting a nail gun into an intruder’s hand, without any sense of how one led to the other.
And because Marsden can never sell himself as a monster — as Hoffman did — he isn’t indicted in the mayhem, so it never becomes a film about the violence inherent to masculinity, like Peckinpah’s, but rather a film about the violence inherent to the South, a much less defensible (or interesting) conceit.
It’s all ultimately just exploitation. The violence in the original made your stomach churn, but in a recent screening of the remake, the ultraviolence produced laughter and applause.
Peckinpah wanted to make you consider something ugly about yourself, even at the risk of giving offense. This film just wants to get you to yell “Nice!” and high-five your friend when some redneck gets boiling water poured on his face.
VERDICT: Straw Dogs is why everyone hates remakes.
rgifford@umdbk.com
