The Details

Straw Dogs

James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgard

Directed by Rod Lurie

Rated R

Beyond the Weekly

Official Movie Site

IMDb: Straw Dogs

Rotten Tomatoes: Straw Dogs

Sam Peckinpah’s controversial 1971 thriller Straw Dogs is not the kind of movie you remake: It’s resolutely of its time, dealing with the changing landscape of gender politics and the turbulent political climate of the 1960s, and it’s a very personal film for Peckinpah, who saw it as his meditation on the nature of violence. Taking all of the basic plot elements and ripping them away from their specific political and personal trappings is an exercise in pointlessness, and while the remake’s writer and director Rod Lurie (The Contender, Resurrecting the Champ) clearly has a lot of respect for Peckinpah’s film, his own version can’t help but come off as second-rate in comparison.

That’s not to say it’s an entirely bad movie, though. Lurie’s Straw Dogs is at times an effective thriller, although it’s nowhere near as shocking as Peckinpah’s was back in 1971, before the era of torture porn. Although Lurie builds the plot just as methodically, there isn’t the same level of tension or unease, just a sense of inevitability. We know that something dangerous is brewing as soon as nebbish screenwriter David Sumner (James Marsden) and his pretty actress wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) show up in her tiny Mississippi home town, because seemingly every inhabitant is a leering redneck stereotype, and those people are only used in movies for racism and/or violence (here it’s mainly the latter).

Amy’s creepy, brawny ex Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard) starts lurking about, and he also happens to be the contractor hired to fix up the Sumners’ hurricane-destroyed barn. Lurie throws in plenty of Deep South clichés to remove all nuance from the showdown between David and the local thugs, making this new film less a meditation on violence than merely the latest big-screen enactment of it. Marsden and Bosworth are no Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, but they both do better work than their resumes would indicate, and Lurie holds onto the film’s most memorably brutal moments, even if he smoothes out some of their problematic ambiguities. For people unfamiliar with Peckinpah’s film, the new Straw Dogs is an exciting if flawed thriller. For everyone else, it’s evidence of how Hollywood can take the most charged, passionate material and make it into something generic and forgettable.