In the remake of “Red Dawn,” Russians seize the East Coast while North Korea conquers and occupies the entire Pacific Northwest. Our last hope is a handful of high school football players, nerds and cheerleaders trying their luck with rocket launchers. So it’s Kim Jong-un versus Some Young Dumb ’Uns.
After paratroopers rain down, the NorKs win over lefty sympathizers with an Occupy Wall Street-like platform of blaming “corporate corruption,” but a large portion of the country remains unconquered: We’re told that from “Michigan to Montana, Alabama to Arizona,” the American way lives on. That sounds like a right-wing fantasy to break off the coasts like crusts of bread. Yet I can hear bicoastal types murmuring, “Wait, we can unload those yokels in the fly-over states in exchange for Communist rule? Win-win!”
The 1984 “Red Dawn” was mediocre, but at least it was warmed by the nutty energy of its writer-director, John Milius, who seemed alarmingly intrigued by the second half of the injunction “Beat the Russians or die trying.”
This time, North Koreans take Spokane. “North Koreans? It doesn’t make any sense,” someone says, speaking for all the head-scratchers in the audience. It makes perfect sense if you consider that the Chinese were originally scripted as the villains, but nobody wants to mess with them anymore, not even in a movie.
Fleeing the NorKs and launching a guerrilla movement are Marine Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth of “Thor”), who is back from a tour in Iraq, and his little brother Matt (Josh Peck), a high school football star. They and Matt’s girl (Isabel Lucas), a geek (Josh Hutcherson), the mayor’s son (Connor Cruise) and Jed’s former camping buddy Toni (Adrianne Palicki) set up a base camp in the woods from which they launch unpredictable attacks. Whenever they win a skirmish, they scream their bloodcurdling cry, “Mighty Ducks!” Er, I mean, “Wolverines!”
The remake reuses highlights from the first film, but the two new screenwriters’ big ideas for freshening up the material are woeful. Remember when the lads kill a deer and make the youngest drink a cup of its blood? This time the kid calls it a “blood latte.” When stuck living in the woods, they say they miss playing “Call of Duty.” “Dude, we’re living ‘Call of Duty,’ and it sucks,” says another guy. A problem with the movie is that you can’t picture anyone involved in it bothering to do any more research into guerrilla warfare than was available from the nearest Xbox.
The director, a rookie named Dan Bradley, did the action scenes in the “Bourne” movies, but here the firefights are clumsily edited, unexciting, routine. When, for instance, the Wolverines disrupt a public execution with an ambush from the rooftops, you can’t tell how they pulled off the raid. All we know is a bunch of shots are fired, and when it’s over our guys are the ones still standing. Bradley can’t even find a fresh way to do a training montage.
And those scenes are Bradley at his best; when it comes to emotional stuff, like the romances between the two couples, he is MIA. The dull, predictable direction is the perfect match for a watery, nondescript cast. Patrick Swayze wasn’t much of a movie star, but he might as well have been Marlon Brando compared to Chris Hemsworth.