Straw Dogs (2011) Review

Straw Dogs (2011)

Even though I tend to scoff at the idea of remaking a classic movie, I always prefer to pull back on my feelings and give remakes a chance. After all, some of them are pretty good, and even occasionally great. Usually the best ones manage to present a new take on old material (Scarface), although very rarely there is one that comes along and recaptures the original nearly scene for scene successfully (True Grit). Straw Dogs is a case of the latter, and while it makes a strong effort, the film can’t help but draw comparisons to original at every turn, and not in its favor.

Plot Synopsis: David Sumner and his wife Amy move to Amy’s hometown in Mississippi. Her old friends greet her with open arms, but David, a scriptwriter used to living in Los Angeles, feels out of place in the Southern environment. Still, Amy’s ex-boyfriend Charlie is friendly to him, so he hires Charlie and his friends to fix the roof on Amy’s barn. But with the tension slowly increasing due to distrust and cultural differences between the locals and David, things don’t remain peaceful for very long.

When viewing a remake, I like to separate the original from the remake in order to give it a fair share on it’s own terms. And on that level, the 2011 version of Straws Dogs works in its own, Southern-fried way. All of the actors do a decent job with their roles, especially Alexander Skarsgaard as Charlie. Skarsgaard managed to take what could’ve been a one-dimensional villain role, and made us genuinely like him and understand his reservations towards David’s rather arrogant attitude. Every one of his interactions with David contains a subtle air of tension behind his affable personality.

James Marsden was also fun to watch in the film, although he feels miscast as the nerdy David. While Marsden is a good actor, he can’t quite shake the sense that he doesn’t fit this role, where Dustin Hoffman was effortlessly able to project both confidence and modesty in the original. Kate Bosworth was fine as Amy, but I wasn’t able to really sympathize with her even though the movie wants us to (which the original didn’t).

Director Rod Lurie clearly wanted to remain faithful to the original, and many of the recreated scenes still retain some of their impact. The original was infamous for it’s controversial rape scene, and I appreciate the fact that Lurie was unafraid to keep that scene in for modern audiences. Nearly as infamous is the climatic attack scene, and nearly all of the especially gruesome demises are preserved in all their bloody glory here.

But as they say, the devil’s in the details, and Lurie also misses out on many of the original’s subtleties that put certain scenes into proper context. The previously mentioned rape scene in the original contained some disturbing undercurrents (which I won’t reveal because of spoilers), and it was understandable why it wasn’t necessary to bring up in the climax. Without those implications in the remake, the scene misses the meaning behind it, and feels pointless and inconsequential because of that.

Also, Dustin Hoffman’s version of David wasn’t an entirely likable character, which made the violent climax even more disturbing because we were unsure about whether we should root for him or not. With Marsden and Bosworth, the tensions between their portrayals of the characters are softened significantly, and the remake clearly wants us to cheer at the ugly violence in the end. It’s predictable and formulaic where the original attempted to do something different and more interesting.

Don’t get me wrong; on it’s own, Straw Dogs is a good movie. There is a great amount of tension running through the film and it’s manages to entertain until the end. But the fact that the movie so wants to replicate the success of the original by recreating it scene-for-scene brings about too many unfortunate comparisons. Rather than pay ten dollars for a theater ticket, it would much easier just to rent the original from the library media resource room for free at U.R.I. You would be getting a more intriguing version of the exact same movie for a much cheaper price.

2.5/4    Rating Criteria