For those that don’t know, this is a remake of the 80’s Charlie Sheen/Patrick Swayze macho-fest where the Russians take over a small town in Colorado, and a ragtag group of misfits (is there any other kind?) fight an insurgency campaign against them. Now, this is a really interesting idea for a movie and it might have been possible to make a decent remake of it now (in a more complicated post-Cold War world where China has replaced Russia) but this movie is a misfire from beginning to end. It takes the worst possible route for a remake, managing to stick too close to the original (there just aren’t enough fun, crazy surprises) but diverging in hundreds of small ways that feel inferior. [If you’re going to change stuff—–and you should, otherwise, what’s the point?—–make sure it’s an upgrade.]
What Works: Not much. I wish I could recommend something in this uninspired, dopey movie, but there is just a lot more that doesn’t work than does. Although I will say that there is a very surprising tragedy very late in the movie that temporarily jolted me out of my stupor. I thought “Now if they had put that more towards the middle and saw how the lead characters reacted to it, that might have been interesting.” But this movie’s not focused on what’s interesting…
What Doesn’t Work: It just feels very lethargic and programmed almost from the beginning, with little sense of new. And Josh Peck (as the secondary lead after Thor’s Chris Hemsworth, more barrel chested Australian than believable small-town war hero) gives a downright awful performance in what should have been the juiciest role in the movie. Whenever he’s called on to “act” in a conflicted, gut-wrenching way, he just looks like a mentally disabled version of Patrick Dempsey.
But the movie’s real problem is that the original villain was supposed to be China, but the producer’s got cold feet and changed it to North Korea at the last minute. [A North Korean army that can barely fire a rocket the right way isn’t a believably menacing villain.] I feel like that really says something about the sorry state of American action movies today, when the gung-ho protagonists are too afraid to fight China…and instead want to play nice by not even mentioning them once during this movie.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Cast anyone but Josh Peck, and stuck to my guns with a Chinese invasion rather than North Korea.