Straw Dogs

Rod Lurie has made a first-rate film of psychological warfare, and yes, I thought it was better than Peckinpah's. Marsden, Bosworth and Skarsgard are all persuasive, and although James Woods has played a lot of evil men during his career, this one may be the scariest.

Peckinpah rubbed our noses in the bloodlust. Lurie invites objectivity. He gets strong, complex performances from actors who won't be painted into corners.

The original "Straw Dogs," at least to me, isn't close to being one of Peckinpah's masterpieces, but it's a movie that the people who first saw it still remember 40 years later. I doubt that anyone will remember the new one by next month.

Whereas Peckinpah managed not only to raise hackles but to get under the skin, Lurie manages only the former, which reduces the material to the level of sensation-mongering.

This new version of Straw Dogs, written and directed by Rod Lurie, has been contemporized, sanitized and stripped of all complexity, and what's left is as empty as a used piñata.

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.

It's a crude, queasy, ugly remake of a crude, queasy, ugly, yet artistically superior 40-year-old Sam Peckinpah movie.

The movie was one of the best thrillers I have seen all year and one of the top six movies on the year that I have seen. Good acting, good story. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie from beginning to end. If you are a fan of the Horror/thriller/Suspense genre as I am then you will enjoy this. Even though it's not much of a horror more thriller/suspense. But really good. I give it four out of five stars. It was really enjoying to watch. It's a realistic scenario that could happen in real life. Maybe not exactly how it transpired in the film, but if you watch it you will understand exactly what I mean.

I went into this with very low expectations and I must say I was pleasantly surprised. Seeing the first hour or so I didn't think it was going to turn into anything interesting at all. But the last half hour or so makes up for it all. I love seeing the good people win in style. Style=Bear Trap.

I enjoyed the film - definitely surpassed my expectations. My main problem with the movie is the motivation of the Skarsgård character. Is he just crazy? What makes the guy tick? The set-up to the final confrontation shouldn't have been rooted in hiding the disabled guy. It gave the bad dudes a somewhat legitimate reason to get in the house. They should have laid siege on the place out of pure rage, revenge, or because some other unjustified reason.

Girlfriend fell asleep and I was still in the mood for a movie, zapped a little on Sky and ran Straw Dogs. For me again one of those films that want to be more than they could ever be. It's a cheap track number, but it doesn't exude the charm that such films can exude. The film wants to be an intelligent thriller, but has far too little tension build-up, basically you know what is going on from the start and you hope that at least the expected action is okay. So the film constructs everything right, puts everything into position in a boring form and then at least manages to stage the mentioned action in an acceptable manner, which still doesn't pull the cart out of the mud. Actually it's okay with Jim Marsden, Kate Bosworth and Alexander Skarsgard, but not anymore, not even with the rest (the dialogues etc. just don't look much). All in all trash without esprit. 3/10 "hillbillies".

Very good performances by very good actors, unfortunately failing to save this film. Entirely predictable (the setups are all way too obvious), the film ponders on forever with more or less only one thing to do - set up the final showdown. When that finally arrives, it all goes horribly wrong when it starts celebrating the violence that you had really hoped wasn't part of the hero's character. Yes, people got "what was coming to them," but the violence was too gratuitous and delivered with too much gusto, which made the main character (and the film) lose its moral high ground. Unpleasant and boring.