I have nothing against remakes in general as long as they do
something worthwhile; there have been many good ones, and the best aren’t
necessarily improvements but merely a fresh look at different aspects of a
familiar situation. The big problem with
Rod Lurie’s Straw Dogs is that the
revolutionary style of Sam Peckinpah is not replaced with an appropriate
alternative; it is simply deleted. Most
importantly, what is completely lost in a Straw
Dogs of 2011 is that there is no power to be derived from the context of
the world around it. 1971’s Straw Dogs was so potent because it reflected
directly on issues of feminism and anti-war protests that were in the air at
the time. Dustin Hoffman’s ‘David’ was a
nebbish mathmatician who fled all the way to Cornwall, England to get away from
America’s culture wars. James Marsden’s
‘David’ is a hot-shot Hollywood screenwriter who only gets as far as rural
Mississippi for as long as it takes to finish his latest script. Peckinpah’s film was fraught with truly
disturbing ambiguity; there is none in Lurie’s version. We even get a concise explanation of the
title; something that Peckinpah left a mystery.
It isn’t really a bad film, but it’s a flat, literal transcription of the same
plot, devoid of Peckinpah’s frightening sensibility and style.
I suppose you could relate this problem to a comparison between the cheapest frozen pizza
you can find and a fresh pizza from Round Table or some such place. Yeah, they’re both pizza, but come on…
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