‘Straw Dogs” is one of those movies that sits in an armchair, smokes a pipe and reflects “seriously” on “the question of violence,” but the main reason to see it is for the hilariously nasty uses it devises for a bear trap, nail gun, etc.
In a remake by writer-director Rod Lurie, James Marsden plays a nerdy Hollywood screenwriter named David Sumner who wafts into Blackwater, Miss., to work on his script with his actress wife, Amy (Kate Bosworth), a native of the little town who is now the star of a TV crime show.
The two of them move into her childhood home. Her ex-boyfriend Charlie (a magnetic Alexander Skarsgard, who gives by far the best performance) is a busted high school football star who now works in construction and offers his crew to repair the couple’s roof.
Charlie is an angry lout who starts behaving in increasingly menacing ways, but then again David drives a convertible Jaguar (with a fake hood ornament), wears Harvard Lacrosse T-shirts and orders Bud Light in the saloon — so for whom are we supposed to root?
As Charlie’s manliness starts to make David look small, Amy grows increasingly frustrated, and even does a striptease that Charlie and his roofers can see. Amy is, in short, asking for trouble, but her supposedly complex character is a muddle.
Her actions don’t make any more sense than the plot, which takes many improbable and self-deflating turns (one shocking moment is followed by a scene in which Amy smiles and serves beers on a platter, another by her suggesting an outing to a football game). If you thought some rednecks meant to do you harm, would you really go hunting with them?
Instead of concentrating on the mano a mano struggle between the omega-male softness of David and the brutishness of Charlie, the story gets distracted by the histrionics of James Woods as a drunken ex-football coach who flies into a rage whenever the local pervert/creep/Boo Radley figure gets near his cheerleader daughter. (She also turns out to be the author of her own misfortunes in another scene that is sure to rile feminists.)
The idea of an intellectual being driven to a sadistic orgy of violence was shocking in the 1971 original film, which starred Dustin Hoffman and was directed by Sam Peckinpah, but bloodshed simply doesn’t register on audiences the way it used to.
Moreover, to put it mildly, the Rod Luries of the world shouldn’t be too eager to be mentioned in the same sentence with Sam Peckinpah. When Peckinpah got the retribution going, the audience wasn’t hooting (as it did on 42nd Street Wednesday night, when this film was screened).
Today it seems inevitable and entirely justified that David should use any means at his disposal to defend himself and his wife, so why does it take Lurie so long to get to the point? His finale, when he finally gets to it, is effectively trashy and rousing.
Shorn of its unneeded subplot and its yokel stereotypes, the film might have been a breathless piece of grindhouse art. As it is, it mainly reminds you that, in “Coward of the County,” Kenny Rogers managed to tell pretty much the same story in four minutes instead of 109.