A Nightmare on Elm Street

Wes Craven’s 1984 original was already a cult classic by the time I got around to seeing it.  That film benefitted, I think, from the low-budget limitations of the slasher genre.  It couldn’t be taken entirely seriously, and yet it was free of the requisites of polished, big-budget cinema.  The 2010 remake, produced by Michael Bay, takes itself far too seriously, and fails to accomplish anything that wasn’t achieved by the original.

Dean Russell (Kellan Lutz) finds himself in a diner, with the usual flickering neon sign screaming imminent danger.  He wanders the restaurant looking for a waitress, and fails to realize he’s dreaming.  This is a recurring nightmare, as he relates to his friend Nancy Holbrook (Rooney Mara).  He’s haunted by a burned man in a crumpled fedora, wearing a glove with knives welded to the fingertips.  This is Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), a suspected child molester.  Roll the shaky opening credits with superimposed chalkboard scrawls, a-la David Fincher’s Se7en and every film thereafter that pillaged its style.  Note that both Mr. Fincher and Nightmare helmsman Samuel Bayer are from the music video school of directing, which also includes alumnus Tarsem Singh—director of the equally-banal, psych-whodunit The Cell.

After years in hiatus, producer Michael Bay dusts off Freddy’s hat for yet another of what seems to be an endless conveyor belt of Hollywood remakes.  The film follows a pattern whereby the victim falls asleep unaware they’ve entered a dream version of their current surroundings.  Said victim then foolishly explores the surreal environment further, until they somehow wind up in a labyrinthine boiler room.  The original Krueger was a janitor, so there was some kind of logic behind this outcome.  However, Mr. Haley’s Krueger is the gardener of a nursery school.  Shouldn’t his victims have ended up in a shed full of gardening implements?  I can hear Freddy’s smug voice, “I’m gonna rake you!”  Here, the film unintentionally recycles an old joke, as if to suggest every building and home in town was built with its own industrial boiler room.  Another old joke: The boiler room Freddy does get chased into resides in what looks like an abandoned industrial facility.  One wonders if Nucor gets royalties every time a movie chase ends up in a steel mill.

In the original series, Nancy’s father, played with unforgettable mediocrity by John Saxon, was a police officer.  This lent some credence to his disbelief in his child’s claims of a murderer who kills people in their dreams.  Mr. Saxon’s Skeptical Authority Figure is transposed onto school administrator Alan Smith (Clancy Brown, a lesser, yet similarly-terrible actor).  His son is Nancy’s friend, Quentin (Kyle Gallner).  Together, Nancy and Quentin rush against the clock to fight an inevitable body count—the video-game extent of the film’s purposefulness.

Ms. Mara’s approach to Nancy reflects a more cynical, jaded generation.  This isn’t a compliment.  The sparse, stilted dialogue of the disaffected teens makes them uninteresting devices with no thoughts beyond plot advancement.  The adult writers possess zero insights into the minds of adolescents, who deserve slightly more credit.  We expect this Nancy to be resourceful, and yet she isn’t.  Her plan to defeat Freddy is poorly conceived and hits several snags.  In the 1984 film, Heather Langeknamp’s daddy’s girl is transformed by trauma into a fighter, setting up an elaborate trap for the knife-wielding, Level 3 burn victim.  This gave the character a sensible arc that made the story interesting, albeit in a shallow way that established use of the now-trite victim’s revenge montage to pump up the audience for the climactic showdown between good and evil.

As Krueger, Haley brings a mix of feigned innocence and creepy maleficence.  The film’s central premise, which I don’t feel I’m spoiling, is that the spectre of Krueger seeks revenge on the children of the angry mob that exacted vigilante justice on him for his crimes.  Nancy, the protagonist, must find a way to overcome Freddy’s supernatural omnipotence.  In the remake, action rigidly adheres to the ongoing body count.  But what separated the original Freddy from the relentless murder machines like Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th) was his glib, running commentary.  The original actor, Robert Englund, an unassuming man when not in makeup, had panache behind the mask.  Mr. Haley has been tasked with taking a more serious tone, and that’s where the film becomes simply preposterous.

Some scenes are re-imagined with a creative use of visual effects, but others only highlight the weaknesses of CG versus traditional, on-set special effects.  Consider an iconic scene where Freddy protrudes out of the wall above Nancy’s bed, stretching the wallpaper.  In the new take, this is all computer-generated—a blurry, giant head/blob.  The shot is uninspired, with Freddy contorting around Nancy like a squishy water balloon.  In the original, the chiaroscuro lighting, and Freddy’s sudden thrust out from the wall gave the appearance of a demon.  Without the musical cues present throughout the rest of the soundtrack, it was one of the scariest images from the original film.  Steve Jablonsky’s score, functioning mostly to annoy you during action sequences, is entirely forgettable.  Jeff Cutter’s (Orphan, Constantine) cinematography follows Samuel Bayer’s music video direction style.  Close-up angles are oriented poorly.  This may be intended to create a sense of claustrophobia, but there’s no center—a third-person, omnipotent point of view to re-orient the viewer with the story.  The result is an unintelligible mess, as if this remake of the slasher-genre favorite is its own dismembered victim.

A Nightmare on Elm Street • Dolby® Digital surround sound in select theatres • Aspect Ratio: 2.39:1 • Running Time: 95 minutes • MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody horror violence, disturbing images, terror and language. • Distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures