"A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010)" Film Review

     I said in the last review that between John Wick and this film, one of them was great and the other was terrible. If you read my John Wick review you would know that I enjoyed it tremendously, so this leaves A Nightmare On Elm Street to be the awful one. 

     I had been wanting to watch this film ever since it hit the theaters, and I will admit that I did think it was okay when I had the chance to watch most of it on YouTube. I also understand that in a moment of weakness and stupidity, this film ended up on my "Top Horror Remakes" List, which I have now deleted. But after watching it all the way through, I was very disappointed in how it turned out. 

     The main issue I had with this movie was the pacing. It was far too fast to establish any context, and the script was so flat that you weren't able to gather any information about the characters before they ended up dying. Why should I care about these people if I don't even know who they are? Hell, for some of them, I didn't even remember their names. The movie was not skilled at all in establishing conflict or delivering exposition, and when it tried to, the entire film just stopped short. Even then, little was explained and the information we did receive did not fit well with what the film was trying to say. It was like watching someone with a throat problem trying to get the words out but being unable to. 

     In terms of the new Freddy, I felt that this one was painfully weak. I get that Jackie Earle Haley is capable of being a decent actor, but his character was not threatening and was really just confusing. I imagined that the reason they introduced him so early on in the film was to create some sort of shock value, the only problem being that it didn't work out that way. His prosthetic makeup was far from being believable and it made it seem like he was trying to move his lips under a giant pile of rubber, which created a sense of disillusionment and really kind of pissed me off. From what I understand, they tried to make the burns more realistic this time around, but the cinematography prevented us from seeing any of the detail. I paid attention to the coloration of many of the shots and felt that it was particularly off in scenes with Freddy. Many of the dream sequences with a red coloration were much too saturated and the lighting was so off that I felt as if Freddy was blending into the background, which took away from the shadowy and intimidating persona he was supposed to have. The dream sequences lacked a surreal atmosphere and did not feel like a dream or otherwise a different entity from the real world, which made for some confusing moments when I couldn't even figure out where the hell the characters were supposed to be. 

     With regards to how the other members of the cast portrayed their characters, I felt as if it would have been more believable if I had any idea as to who they were. Literally next to nothing was revealed about them and even though they made a point of trying to center it on Rooney Mara's character, I had a hard time believing that she was the protagonist. Everyone either switched from unemotionless and bored to an overacting mess of hysterics, and even the hysterical bits felt a bit underplayed. I also had a huge problem with twenty-somethings playing teenagers, and though it happens in nearly every high school movie, that doesn't mean it's a trend that we should be continuing. I really felt that this movie needed a lot of work and had to develop a lot more than it cared to, and unfortunately it just didn't seem to care about itself that much. An oppurtunity to make a mostly-campy movie into something darker failed to do its job by just not giving a shit either way.

     Overall rating: 4/10 

"John Wick" Film Review

     After taking a few weeks off to focus more on schoolwork and chill from the film reviews for a bit, I felt it was necessary to finally get around to reviewing two movies that I have seen recently. The films I will be reviewing today are John Wick and A Nightmare On Elm Street (2010), with one of them being great and the other being terrible. So first, I will look at John Wick. 

     Walking into this movie, I was interested enough by the trailer to see if Keanu Reeves would manage to bring himself back into the public eye considering that his career has mainly been surviving on indie films and box-office bombs ever since the Matrix trilogy ended. And to my suprise, I was very entertained. I expected this to be a rip-off of Taken, and to be fair, the main story does consist of the main character being bent on vengeance, but it's in a slightly different context. The film focuses on a former hit man (Reeves), who retired to care for his dying wife. When she dies, he finds that she left behind a dog for him to care for, so that he would have something to love in her absence, but when John Wick encounters a few assholes at a gas station and refuses to sell off his car to them, they break into his house, beat the shit out of him and kill his dog. He then gets pulled back into the world he once belonged to as he searches for the men responsible, who happen to be connected to his former employer. 

     Say what you want about Reeves, but in this case, his slightly stiff acting actually works for the character. The fact that he was broken up from his wife's death was not beaten over the head of the audience, and I really appreciated that the director trusted the audience enough to not do a flashback. Apparently the director did not perceive the audience to be complete idiots, and this helped to keep a consistent flow for the movie and made everything a bit more realistic. The movie was very stylish but not in an overt manner, and it did not have the huge ego that would have made the experience annoying. The cinematography was decent, and overall the script did its job pretty well to present the conflict in both the inner and outer dimensions of the characters. It seemed to be paying an homage to a lot of classic action films, but insead of this being cheesy, it came off as pretty interesting. Overall I would say that I was impressed with this movie and it made for a refreshing break from the other crap that has been coming out recently. 

Overall rating: 9/10