rochefort [Celluloid 09.29.12] action adventure



Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth) has just returned from active military duty to his sleepy hometown in Washington to try and pick up the pieces with his estranged brother Matt (Josh Peck), when one morning he walks outside and sees a sky full of North Korean paratroopers. He and Matt and a small handful of their high school buddies barely escape to a cabin in the mountains, and after witnessing their father's execution by Captain Lo (Will Yun Lee), Jed knuckles up and gives the group a crash course in guerrilla warfare. They take the battle back to their North Korean occupiers, bombing and assassinating key strategic points and personnel, but once the Russians enter the fray their days become numbered.

Another remake, another review where I'll be damned if I can't help but parrot most of the things most of us already know, and not about remakes, mind you, but Hollywood. "Red Dawn", a troubled film that's been in the can for a couple of years, is a new stab at the 1984 John Milius' potboiler that pitted the Russkies against the Pepsi Generation and made C. Thomas Howell a psychopath. And like almost every freakin' one out there these days, I don't even get the option to judge this one solely on its own merits. But I'll say this again: remakes are not an evil thing in and of themselves. John Carpenter's "The Thing" is a classic, and a classic example of why redoing a film (or readapting its paper-bound source material, which is actually just as often the case) can be just as valid artistically as commercially. When you also consider "The Fly", "True Grit", "Invasion of the Body Snatchers", "3:10 to Yuma", "The Magnificent 7" and even "Dredd", among others, it gets pretty difficult to categorically dismiss the remake as a cynical cash grab. And with "Red Dawn", you can't even make the "too soon" argument, as there are nearly thirty years between the two films (ouch).


But this new version does nothing whatsoever to justify its existence. Directed by Dan Bradley, and featuring a cast that includes Josh Hutcherson, Adrianne Palicki and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, the latest "Red Dawn" features a North Korean threat that was dialed down once the investors remembered their business interests in China, about a third more action than the original film, and not much else. Hemsworth looks tired all the way through, as if he knows there's far too much weight on his shoulders carrying the whole thing, and most of the rest of the cast barely registers. Hutcherson, who also played some recent Hunger Games, mainly serves as a reminder that half of everything that gets made these days is an attempt to appeal to the "young adult" crowd, this film included. The tykes go from wide-eyed football players and cheerleaders to not-terribly-convincing guerrilla commando unit in the span of a five-minute montage, I kid you not, which includes a whole lot of target practice in the woods that somehow never attracts the attention of the heavily-armed N.K. force just miles away. And when Morgan and his marine buddies show up a little later, they remind us that we're watching a remake of a film made in the 80's, cuz their dialogue still has that era's smelly dust on it. And honestly, the original isn't even that good. It's as distinctly of-its-time as "The Lost Boys" or "Flashdance", and has retained its following largely because of the novelty (at the time) of its premise, which really shines a light on just how pointless an effort this new version was always destined to be.

The argument, as far as I can tell, is NOT about whether or not a given story can be told anew from one generation or even decade to the next. You rarely hear anyone complaining about all the versions of "A Christmas Carol" or Shakespeare's plays, so what is it that grates on so many of our nerves when we hear that this or that movie is being redone with a "hot" young cast and director? I'll throw my hat in the ring here: I think it's because, deep down, those of us who were born before, say, 1980, already feel like we eat too much crow four times out of five when we go to the movies to see the big studio pictures. We feel that ever since "Star Wars" jump-started the blockbuster era, the game in H'wood has so radically changed from what we perceive of the romanticized 70's. And that's sorta right, but not really right enough. There have been crap films since there's been film, and the classics and favorites have always been the minority portion of any year's given output. We just tend to forget the awful and mediocre ones, for the most part, but the truth is that while most of those forgettable films may not harken directly to any other preexisting film, they're so derivative and cliched that they might as well be remakes. There are only so many kinds of story formulae to being with. When a film like this latest "Red Dawn" fails, it fails seemingly twice as much, because its makers couldn't even make it work with so much groundwork already laid by the previous version. That's why I think we're so sick of these rehashes; they often end up being substandard work by guys who had every opportunity to spin fresh gold. Even more so than the regularly scheduled crap, the majority of big money "event" remakes bludgeon us, over and over again, with yet another bland and tiresome affirmation that there's often a huge difference between simply working in the industry and actually knowing how to make a good movie.

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