Fans instantly chirped at the news that Jackie Earle Haley had been cast as Freddy Krueger, that irreplaceable haunter of dreams, in the new redux of A Nightmare on Elm Street. Some, having seen Haley’s exceptional work in Little Children and Watchmen, eagerly awaited his take on the well-known villain. Others poo-poohed the casting, insisting that the only real Freddy is the original, Robert Englund.
It has been interesting seeing Englund’s performance of Freddy evolve over the many sequels: from a powerful evil presence in the first film, to a jokester in the third film, then just a joke in later efforts. Casting another actor stops Freddy in his tracks, and only works if the filmmakers have a new direction to take the character in. In this case, they do not.
Not only does the casting of Haley—who’s far too talented an actor to be involved in the first place—bring nothing to the film, but the new Nightmare is poorly written, badly acted, and amateurishly directed to boot. I remember making movies like this with my VHS camcorder when I was 12. The Be Kind Rewind guys would have made a more professional-looking film than this.
It follows the plot of the original film fairly closely. Teenagers in Springwood have been having graphic nightmares in which a man with a burnt face, a striped sweater, and knives on his fingers stalks them. Soon they begin to notice that when they’re cut in their dreams, they bleed in real life. The parents seem to have some idea of what’s going on, but stay suspiciously silent. It all ties back to Fred Krueger.
Freddy’s backstory is well-known at this point, but this movie dwells on it as if it’s a surprise. Each detail is spelled out as if the movie aspires to be an encyclopedia of movie monsters for nerds. The 2009 Friday the 13th remake was no classic, but it at least began knowingly, with a prologue that assumed we knew who Jason was and then moved on quickly.
Everything that the new Nightmare tells us about Freddy is something we know from the original film. The only new step the movie takes is to focus uncomfortably on Freddy’s pedophilia, so that we’re rewarded with several flashback scenes of Mr. Krueger asking young girls if they want to know a secret. Barf.
The casting of Jackie Earle Haley might have easily led the film in a new direction. Haley was no doubt cast because of his excellent Oscar-nominated performance in Little Children, in which he played a convicted pedophile who was sick and afflicted, and garnered our sympathy. Are we ready for a sadder, resigned Freddy Krueger, who’s a monster simply because there’s nothing else he can be? Apparently not; Haley’s take on Freddy is pretty much the same old stuff, and at times he even seems to be parroting Englund. Even Englund’s snappy jokey dialogue from the later sequels would have been welcomed here. Instead we get this:
Teenager: “You’re not real.”
Freddy: “I’m real.”
There are other actors in the film going through the motions. One is the delightful Rooney Mara, whose work in The Social Network had already lifted her above junk like this. Connie Britton appears as one of the moms, but her performance as a standard plot-deliverer only reminds us of Ronee Blakley’s brilliant off-the-wall portrayal of the same character in the original.
So much more could have been done with this plot. With the steep takeoff of ADD drugs in recent years, something might have been done with the fact that kids actually are awake all night nowadays. There’s one scene involving a video blogger that might have been expanded upon, but is quickly dismissed. There are ways to update A Nightmare on Elm Street for the times without simply rehashing it.
What an incredible bore this movie is. There’s not one legitimate scare in it. Not one. It carbon-copies the original but sucks out everything that made it work. The characters are turned into lame teen soap stars, the plot is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, and Freddy is made inert. One of the writers is Wesley Strick, who has written some very good thrillers over the past twenty years: Arachnophobia, Wolf, Return to Paradise, Doom, the Martin Scorsese Cape Fear. His draft for A Nightmare on Elm Street should never have left the bottom drawer.
* out of ****
Is it really that bad?: It's excruciating.
Pain level: Advanced.
No comments:
Post a Comment