The "Straw Dogs" remake is awful

Cafe Society
1

The remake of Straw Dogs, starring James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard, Walton Goggins and James Woods, is absolute dreck. This is an abomination of a film that should never have been made.

The setting has been changed from rural Cornwall to rural Mississippi - a town called “Blackwater” (ooooh, how ominous-sounding! Get it - the town has a scary name, so the people in it are scary!) David Sumner is now a Hollywood screenwriter, rather than a mathematician; his wife is a television actress.

First of all, I have to say, they did a good job of dorking up James Marsden. This is a guy who usually plays stud superheros, so to his credit, he was able to convincingly pull off a wimpy character. Kate Bosworth, one of the worst actresses I have ever seen in my entire movie-watching life, had nothing redeemable at all about her character, on the other hand. She was attractive, if you like the thin, waif type look. But a completely one dimensional character.

There was absolutely none of the combination of playfulness and tension between David and Amy that there was in the original. The characters were frigid towards each other and had zero chemistry.

Now, as for the menacing local roofers: this part of the movie was particularly wretched. In the original film, the tormenting of David Sumner by Charlie Venner and his gang starts out as bullying-disguised-as-good-natured-banter. This is especially menacing because it’s the most common type of actual bullying, from what I have observed. Venner, Causey and the other townie guys gradually transition from ball-breaking wisecracks and playful ribbing to genuinely dangerous and violent behavior. However, in this terrible remake, all of the local guys are totally surly and rude right from the get-go. There is none of the subtle and menacing tension…just, “well, these are the bad guys…they’re bad…they’re going to do bad things in this movie. That’s that.” Totally one-dimensional, cardboard characters.

The local sheriff, called “the Major” in the original film, is now a black man. This bit was particularly unbelievable. This is a tiny town in the deep South where every single denizen is a surly, brutish redneck, and I’m supposed to believe that they elect a black sheriff?

After the hunting sequence - changed from a jaw-droppingly suspenseful pheasant hunt to a jaw-droppingly pointless and poorly-acted deer hunt - David walks along the road with his borrowed rifle, and is stopped by the sheriff…who asks him if his rifle is registered and tells him that it’s against the law to go walking around with an unregistered rifle. I realize the people in Hollywood usually have very little understanding of rural culture, but do they really not know how inaccurate and ridiculous this is? I think most movie-going Americans know that you don’t need to register a hunting rifle in Bumfuck, Mississippi. I would have accepted this in a European-made movie, but it’s pretty inexcusable in this one.

Henry Niles is now Jeremy Niles (why?) and his older brother - one of the vanishingly few non-evil townie characters - is played by Walton Goggins. This might be the most obscene thing about the whole film, actually: the fact that Walton Goggins, who as any viewer of The Shield will know, plays one of the most sleazy, slimy, unsympathetic, arrogant, obnoxious, cold-blooded, menacing and violent characters on television, was used as a good guy in this fucking movie - and not only that, but a good guy who has about five minutes of total screen time. What an unbelievable, putrid, vile, execrable waste of a good actor.

This movie is such horseshit. I wonder if Dustin Hoffman has spoken out against it?

2

…so… did you like the movie or not?

3

I didn’t know this movie was a remake until I saw the credits. I don’t know who James Marsden or Kate Bosworth are, although I’m sure I’ve seen them in other flicks. And you know what? I liked it. I think everyone’s motives were realistic – with the possible exception of James Woods, whose drunken ex-football coach was a little bit over the top – and I think it was paced well. I disagree with you especially about the relationship of the roofers to David: it did start off with innocent “fuck you, city boy” ribbing and progressed to “No, seriously, fuck you, city boy” harrassment. I don’t give a shit that the protagonist is now a writer instead of a mathematician; did he use Fermat’s Last Theorem to defeat the bad guys in the original? If not, why does it matter? I thought the lead bad guy (Charlie?) was especially menacing. Convincing performances all around, in fact.

Honestly, your post can be boiled down to, “I like the original better” – which is fine, but says little about the quality of the remake.

4

Marsden and Bosworth were both in Superman Returns.

Marsden played Cyclops in the X-Men movies. He also played Prince Edward in Enchanted.

Bosworth’s made several movies but none of them have been major hits. She was in Blue Crush, 21, Win a Date with Tad Hamilton! and Wonderland.

5

Disagreed, It’s a surprisingly intense movie. Sure, it’s a Hollywood-ized remake of a counter cultural staple of the seventies, but it still does manage to keep some of Peckinpah’s most insane particularities, which make it a movie like nothing produced nowadays anyway.

Rob Lurie is not a demented genius, like Sam was, but he’s a good professional, and knows how to build up the suspense. Marsden is no Hoffman, and Lurie uses that to the advantage of the film, instead of the Strasberg method acting Hoffman used, all weird mannerisms and mumbling, Marsden and Bosworth are plain, subdued placeholders for the audience, allowing all the charismatic scenery munching to the actual talent, the always wonderfully smarmy Skaasgard and Woods.

That makes it different from the original couple, constantly bickering (at one point, the original David Summers is so angry at his cowardly wife, he almost allows her to leave the cottage, knowing full well the townies will just kill her, changing his mind at the last second) and, if not better, gives a new texture to the whole thing. The fact that the new Summers is writing about Stalingrad really ties well with his behaviour in the siege.

But more than everything else, it’s thousands of times more daring and hard to watch than 99% of the sanitized Hollywood blockbusters being spewed every week. Not as great or misanthropic as the original, but a movie that would have critics quite excited if it wasn’t a remake.