MyRating: Y1/2Director: Samuel Bayer
Cast: Jackie Earle Haley, Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner, Katie Cassidy, Thomas Dekker, Kellan Lutz
MPAA: Rated R for strong bloody horror violence, disturbing images, terror and language
A bunch of teenagers living in Elm Street, Dean (Lutz), Kris (Cassidy), Jesse (Dekker), Nancy (Mara) and Quentin (Gallner) are terrorized by extremely terrified nightmares over and over again. In their dreams, they are hunting by a scary and ugly man with burned-scars all over his body and face, wearing a red and green striped sweater, a fedora hat, and a glove with long-sharp razor-knives in his fingers. Once they fall asleep, that boogeyman will appear in their dreams and ready to kill them.
When one of them died tragically in his dream, the four remaining friends just realize that they are actually having the same dreams and being hunted by the same man in their dreams. And they start to uncover a very dark secret kept by their parents for years, that links all of them together in the past, when they were kids, with a man named Freddy Kruger (Haley). Freddy was brutally killed by their parents and their society because of the wrongdoing that he did. Now, this man comes back to take revenges, in their dreams. And the way to stay alive, is to stay awake.
I am a person who do not mind for a remake at all, since we have seen many remakes that have proved to be enjoyable and good in quality, as long as the filmmakers do not just copy the exact storyline and then put it scene by scene in the new movie just exact the same as the original. And it will be much better if they take a totally different approach to the remake, so that the film may look fresh. The easy one is the last reboot of James Bond's Casino Royale (2006). That one is a very good and highly entertaining movie with a daring new approach, and the result was, everybody just loved and talked about the movie. I happened to like and enjoy the latest remake of Friday the 13th (2009) too, not a totally different approach from the original, but the storyline somehow excited me.
This new A Nightmare on Elm Street was surely did not fall into the category of copying the exact storyline from the original. It did use a slightly different story with new characters, even though the background of Freddy Kruger was still the same. Anyway, it should be the same, because we definitely do not want our lunatic Freddy suddenly turns into a not-guilty person who was wrongly punished by the people, and then he comes back for a revenge after he died, right? So, what went wrong? The script. The story was just not good enough, very predictable, and somehow felt stale. You just knew what will happen next, and the tension did not really grip you at your seat. All the scary moments were like deja vu of what you've seen before in the past. Actually, I felt boring halfway thru the movie.
Now, about Jackie Earle Haley as the new Freddy. I must admit that Robert Englund has a great charisma as Freddy Kruger, with his iconic ugly-sinister smile and a slightly scary-comedic approach, that will be difficult to be replaced in our minds. The new Freddy of Haley's version is more serious. His face is even nastier and messier. But I think that was also the reason why the aura of Freddy Kruger (that we loved) did not really show-up and shine in this movie. Haley did not play the character bad actually, but with his new ordinary approach, somehow it seems like this character can be played by any other actors with antagonist faces.
So, how to play the character without copying Robert Englund? Actually it can be done. Remember Heath Ledger with his approach to Joker's character in The Dark Knight? He played the character brilliantly, even though he was overshadowed by Jack Nicholson's version of Joker at the beginning. And that was the performance of his (Ledger's) lifetime. This is actually the job of the actor to find the creative way to play his character as something new and fresh. But of course, he should get a good script at the first place. It's just hard to beat the already great predecessor.
This is not a good remake as what we expected. (MJ)
