Cinema Verdict Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street

A Nightmare on Elm Street

OPENING: 04/30/2010

STUDIO: New Line Cinema

RUN TIME: 95 min

ACCOMPLICES:
Trailer, Official Site

The Charge
He knows where you sleep.

Opening Statement
Don’t be fooled by any promises that A Nightmare on Elm Street has been reinvented or reimagined in any way. Despite a small handful of relatively minor plot adjustments and a brand-new Freddy Krueger (played by the talented Jackie Earle Haley, Watchmen), this Nightmare merely offers more of the same.

Facts of the Case
You’re probably familiar with the basic premise by now: a creepy serial killer wearing an incredibly tacky sweater starts killing teenagers in their dreams. Any time one of the pre-selected teens falls asleep, odds are very high that he or she will quickly encounter the violent Freddy Krueger, at which point Freddy will try to kill the teenager with his patented knife-fingers. The teenagers are named Nancy (Rooney Mara, Youth in Revolt), Quentin (Kyle Gallner, Jennifer’s Body), Kris (Katie Cassidy, Harper’s Island), Jesse (Thomas Dekker, Heroes) and Dean (Kellan Lutz, Twilight). To point out anyone in particular would only be an indication of how long they survive the movie. The only reason we remember much about some of these characters is because they manage to stay on-screen throughout the majority of the film. In other words, they’re more or less interchangeable.

The Evidence
So why is Freddy Krueger attempting to kill all of these attractive high school seniors? Well, it seems that a long time ago, these students were all placed in the same daycare. Fred Krueger spent a lot of time there. He was initially regarded as a great friend for the kids, but after some suspect evidence turned up he was accused of abusing the children. Without taking much time to examine the evidence, the parents of the children hunted Freddy down and murdered him in cold blood. The question of whether Freddy was a victim or a monster is an intriguing element, but there’s not much else that manages to engage the mind in A Nightmare on Elm Street.

The most surprising thing about the film is just how much it feels like a pre-packaged product tossed off the now-familiar Freddy Krueger assembly line. There’s so little to distinguish this film from its many predecessors; it follows every routine convention and never manages to surprise us in any way. The teenagers wander through the film with such listlessness and lack of personality that we can’t but feel they’re all merely going through the motions. The expected amount of “boo” moments, musical stings, semi-gory kills and obnoxious fake-outs are offered; as audiences apparently haven’t grown tired of the exact same techniques being used over and over in nearly every slasher film made over the course of the last 30 years. Even the screams at the screening I attended felt pre-meditated; there’s nothing in the film that’s going to genuinely scare or unnerve anyone who’s seen a horror movie or two before.

To be fair, Jackie Earle Haley gives his all in an attempt to make Freddy a truly nightmarish and complex monster. He has a raw intensity that Robert Englund never came close to, and his tortured expressions do a wonderful job of conveying a blend of hurt, rage and sadism. The problem is that Freddy Krueger is still Freddy Krueger. When Wes Craven introduced the iconic character to the world in the ‘80s, he was a novel concept and a genuinely creepy one. Over the course of the last 25 years, Freddy has slipped too deeply into pop culture and is now little more than a punch line. The screenplay could have attempted to remedy that, but instead it saddles the ambitious Haley with the same old wheezy one-liners. Try as he might to turn them into haunting pronouncements, the actor just can’t do anything to prevent the feeling that Freddy’s merely a joke that’s been told too many times.

Closing Statement
There’s nothing spectacularly awful about the new A Nightmare on Elm Street; it’s competently crafted and it’s by no means the low point of the franchise. Even so, it finally proves to be just another horror remake that fails to justify its existence. I think I might have preferred an aggressively bad remake over one that was this routine and, well… boring. Alas, as long as people keep paying to see the same thing again and again, Hollywood will keep generating the same thing again and again. Here’s a toast to the day when moviegoers decide to bust up the machine and demand something fresh.

The Verdict
4/10

• “”>