Straw Dogs (Film): Review.
Based on the novel published in 1969, The Siege of Trencher's Farm, written by Gordon Williams, the director Sam Peckinpah decided, in 1971, to film Straw Dogs, examines the human's instinctive capacity for violence and shows it to the viewer without no type of reservation. Later, in 2011, a remake of the film directed by Peckinpah was released, titled in the same way, this time directed by Rod Lurie. On this occasion I will talk about one of them.
To read the review of the original film click here.
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Year: 2011
Category: Psychological Thriller, Action.
Director: Rod Lurie.
Cast: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, Alexander Skarsgård, Dominic Purcell, Rhys Coiro, Willa Holland, James Woods.
Plot
The marriage formed by David and Amy, this time performed by James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, moves to her hometown, Blackwater, Mississippi. A quiet place, with the intention that he can finish the script he writes, however, the tranquility of the protagonists will be obstructed by the presence of some villagers in the zone of the house.
Opinion
Changing the couple formed by Dustin Hoffman and Susan George with two less relevant actors such as James Marsden and Kate Bosworth, this remake tries to imitate Peckinpah's film much more than Gordon Williams novel. This remake incorporates a new location among its few changes. The film moves from the surly English landscape to the muddy marshy lands of Louisiana, using the Deep South as the ideal territory to unleash the hunt of man for man.
Sam Peckinpah showed us, in the original version, a couple with nothing in common. The David of that movie was a mathematician married to Amy, a beautiful and capricious girl in need of male attention, their relationship does not allow to suspect any possible interest on the part of the woman. In this version presented by Rod Lurie, the opposite happens, the David of this film is a Hollywood screenwriter and Amy is an actress, so taking into account the character of the situation, the viewer could assume that she is related to the protagonist by mere interest.
Like the original story, this time we talked about a couple moving from the big city to a remote town. Amy, like in the 1971 version, spent her youth there and has a loving past with a boy who never left town. Now, she has a different life and a husband who is the antithesis of the men of that place, and that her way of life is almost an insult to the culture of the men who live in this small town. However, the couple decides to hire a group of workers to help them fix some parts of the house that are failing, and among them is Amy's old boyfriend. Soon all this leads to a fatal outcome, just like the original movie.
The strange, or little congruent, is that here the villagers do not seem direct heirs of those who presented us in the original film. In this film the villagers seem reasonable people, neat, well cared for and well integrated into a modern society. With which, the events of the film seem difficult to understand, on the other hand, the David that is shown here abandons a church before the whole town because he gets bored and then goes to sleep in the car, which is an inconceivable irreverence in someone like him.
The worst part of the film is that we expect it to emulate the original film, especially the ending, that poem to justified violence that Peckinpah did in the third act, but here it is much more subtle. On this occasion the violent ending occurs as a direct consequence of wanting to imitate what was done in the original film, so it is a film that has a good dose of psychological and emotional suspense in its first two parts and unfortunately loses strength with an ending with which can not be done much more, mainly because it is limited to copying many scenes from the original.
Different from the rawness shown in the original, this time everything is softened; the unhealthy air of the original here is absent, although I suppose it also influences the evolution of society and the viewer, since what 47 years ago could seem risky now is boring and topical, after all, the violence that breaks out in the final section of the original, is now something merely anecdotal, mainly due to the access that the modern viewer has to violence.
Trailer
Score
6/10
Although it has obvious shortcomings, if we look at the film without previous expectations and without knowing or not remember the old version, I must say that this is not a bad film, since it meets the minimum requirements of entertainment.
To be honest I don’t like this movie, I found it boring and predictable. The violence scene was cruel but as you write viewers nowadays have access to worse violence pictures so they don’t surprised.
True, violence today is quite explicit. The film really does not bring anything new, and is based mostly on the original 1971 film, which is better than this, of course, without becoming anything special either. I practically give 6 points to any movie that can be seen from the beginning to the end without the eyes begin to bleed.