The opening scene of “Nightmare on Elm Street” (after a lame-ass, sub-“Se7en” credits sequence) takes place in the Springwood Diner. High schooler Dean (Kellan Lutz) is fighting to stay away. He flashes into sleep, and is terrorized by bland-looking “nightmares” (the diner is suddenly empty, fires rage and a man with knives for fingers pops out of the darkness). When he awakens he looks down at his hand — it’s bleeding! The nightmares are real! But already, the audience has fallen into a coma.
This shit is dull.
We’re introduced to our cast of young characters and they’re all the same: bland, white, unimpressed. Nancy (Rooney Mara) is a waitress at the diner, loosely based on the Heather Langenkamp character in Wes Craven’s 1984 original, and only notable for her embroidered tights and the fact that she barely cracks her mouth open when she talks. Enunciation, it seems, isn’t essential in the fight against night terrors. We also meet Kris (Kate Cassidy), who’s the focus of the movie for the first 30 minutes or so, so much in fact that you’ll wonder if she isn’t the Nancy stand in, especially since she’s blonder, perkier, and sporting more impressive cleavage. There’s also rugged Jesse (Thomas Dekker) and outcast Quentin (Kyle Gallner, essentially playing his character from the vastly superior “Jennifer’s Body”). They are all incredibly boring.
The sequence in the diner ends with Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley) jumping out of the dream world and forcing Dean to slice his own neck open. But there’s nothing particularly shocking or scary about this and the way that the young actor drags the phony knife across his own neck isn’t terribly convincing. Instead, it’s just terrible. And the “gag” of his cut throat isn’t all that violent either. Instead of a fountain of blood it’s more like a trickle.
Lack of invention and any real scares, which the opening scene is a prime example of, carries through the rest of the film. It’s sort of unfathomable. This is a movie made in the year 2010, with every technological avenue available to the filmmakers, and there is zero imagination. There’s not one dream sequence that makes you shriek or jump or even goggle at the screen, impressed by the creativity run amok that almost certainly affords any movie about dreams. Time and time again the movie either limply fizzles out (a promising sequence in a pool is undone by lack of imagination) or cribs from the original film to diminished returns (the famous “blood geyser” death of Johnny Depp is ripped off for not one but two separate scenes).
It doesn’t help that the script by Eric Heissener and the not-altogether-horrible Wesley Strick is strictly by-the-numbers. At one point, a scared white teen (maybe Nancy) says to another scared white teen (Quentin, probably) that she’s had the same dream as him. “Freddy?” she inquires. Except at this point in the movie NO ONE has mentioned Freddy and he hasn’t introduced himself in her dream, either. It’s one of those glaringly painful moments that crop up, again and again and again.
Jackie Earle Haley, who, between “Watchmen” and this is cornering the market on sociopaths with gravelly voices who wear brown hats, brings very little to the role of the clawed madman. For one, he’s caked in both make-up (that makes him look like a post-chemical peel Joan Rivers) and even crummier computer-generated stuff, kind of like Frank Langella in “The Box.” It’s just that, since the scenes with Krueger are so few and far between and the scenes so poorly lit, that it was at least halfway through the movie that you even realize there’s some computer generated trickery going on. He’s also saddled with some “Hannibal Rising”-esque backstory, which does nothing to make the character “more human.” It just makes things even more confusing, because the kids, while attempting their best Nancy Drew impressions in order to figure out what very bad thing their parents did a very long time ago, are fed more information through elaborate dream sequences in which Freddy just shows them what happens and doesn’t try to, you know, carve them up like a Thanksgiving turkey.
Director Samuel Bayer is making his feature length debut after making music videos for about a thousand years (he made “Smells Like Teen Spirit” for crying out loud) and it says something that it’s taken this long to get his first directorial gig. Every visual decision seems hoary, cliched, and uninteresting. The entire time we were thinking that this would have been an ideal project for Tarsem, whose trippy movies “The Cell” and “The Fall” weren’t exactly cinematic touchstones, but would have at least taken the whole “dream” concept and done something with it.
While the new “Nightmare” may not be as visually and creatively bankrupt as last year’s abhorrent “Friday the 13th” remake, it is considerably less lively. Rarely has a horror remake, aimed at a young Friday night audience, been this bloodless (literally – “CSI” is gorier), sexless (no nudity or even implication of sex), humorless or dull. And as an addition to the franchise, it’s a huge disappointment too. All the scares come from shock cuts or “cat jumping out of alleyway”-style fake scares. The psychological depth of the original film, the hellzapoppin’ lunacy of its sequels, and the operatic Grand Guignol of “Freddy vs. Jason” have been replaced by somber, foggy nothingness. This film is a nightmare you can’t wait to wake up from. [F]
–Written by Drew