Director: Rod Lurie
Starring: James Marsden, Kate Bosworth, James Woods and Alexander Skarsgård
**
Is nothing sacred in Hollywood? Sam Peckinpah's rape-revenge drama gets a modern-day makeover, swapping England's Cornwall for the Mississippi Gulf Coast.
The first - and perhaps only - question worth asking is: "Why bother?" Peckinpah's 1971 film, which starred Dustin Hoffman as the bespectacled mathematician David Sumner who fights back when his wife is raped, remains a potent exploration of latent violence.
The remake, while a competently directed thriller, is banal by comparison. Here, Marsden is Sumner, now a screenwriter working on a film about the Siege of Stalingrad (a clumsy foreshadowing of events to come). The ever-bland Bosworth is wife Amy, returning to her hometown where she used to date the redneck ruffian Charlie (Skarsgård), who still holds a candle for her - until his sexual urges get the better of him.
It all leads to the inevitable showdown, with Lurie sliding in images (broken spectacles, the bear-trap) familiar from the original. Skarsgård spends much of the film with his shirt off, presumably to sate female True Blood followers, while Woods fans are briefly reminded of former glories, as the alcoholic father who joins Charlie on the rampage.
There's even a full explanation of the title (not in the original) - further underlining the dumbing down in this sacrilegious retread.
