'Straw Dogs': Intellectual Liberals Vs. Tea Party Hicks

Film critic Roger Moore (no right winger) in the Orlando Sentinel:

Equal measures smug and savage, Rod Lurie’s infuriating remake of Sam Peckinpah’s vengeance thriller “Straw Dogs” still packs a visceral punch. An exploitation picture built on redneck cliches and big city liberal outrage, it’s not all bad. But it is a pretty unpleasant wallow in the obvious.

Lurie, whose career has become a careen (unreleased or under-released failures) since “The Contender,” has cleverly re-set the tale, that of a mild-mannered bookish and emasculated city dweller (Dustin Hoffman in the original, James Marsden here) challenged, bullied and battered by brutish, primitive locals from England to Mississippi. …

Lurie’s resetting of the movie may seem dated to a real Southerner. But you don’t have to dig into ancient history to find the redneck thuggery suggested here. Where the original film was a commentary on the endangered state of manhood in the late 20th century, Lurie seems to be making points about the ineffectual ways reasonable people face belligerent ignorance. It’s intellectual liberals vs. Tea Party hicks with guns. Get it?

One “improvement” stands out. Sam Peckinpah rather famously forgot to leave out the Chinese proverb that gave the original film its title. Lurie has David explain it in a moment that feels like a class recitation. It comes right after the nightly chess lesson he gives his young/naive wife.

It’s not a terrible film, but “Straw Dogs,” this time around, does push the wrong sorts of buttons. It veers from its social commentary into the trite and bloody, with a finale that is unimaginative and rote. Lurie, desperate to make something people will see, has bloodied his hands and sullied his motives to make a movie that is as ugly as it is out of date.

Our thanks to Mr. Moore for the sucker-punch heads up.

Instead of wasting your money to get insulted by a lazy, bigoted director — Netflix the original. Amazing film. Epic stuff in the departments of gut-wrenching and that existential thematic drive we saw so much of (and successfully) in the early ’70s.