If nothing else, the new remake of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” proves that, even when most parts of a movie don’t work, a great performance can pull it out of the fire. Though he’s one of only a couple of people in this film who knows what they’re doing, Jackie Earle Haley does such an incredible job playing Freddy Krueger that he makes the whole thing worth the price of admission. Sure, Robert Englund practically owns this character for eternity, but Haley still manages to do the role justice as a kind of Roger Moore to Englund’s Sean Connery.
Of course, the premise is really effective, too, although the original 1984 film went much further with it. The plot is pretty much the second verse of the same song: Freddy terrorizes high-school students in their dreams, where he tries to kill them off before they can wake up. After a handful of them start turning up dead, a teenager named Quentin (Kyle Galler), who has some suspicions as to what’s behind all this, begins doing some research on insomnia to find out how long he can resist sleep. He tells our heroine Nancy (Rooney Mara) that, without an adequate amount of sleep, the body sporadically shuts down for “mirconaps” that give them a precious few seconds to conserve energy. You’d think the brevity of their dreams would protect them, but unfortunately, Freddy never takes long to show up.
With everything this movie has going for it, it’s a shame that most of the people who made it couldn’t put the pieces together. Though it must be said that Connie Britton does a pretty good job as Nancy’s mom, all of the other actors bring the wrong kind of drama to it, the kind that wouldn’t be out of place in an action film but doesn’t seem quite right in a horror movie like this. Plus, even though the premise was a stretch to begin with, the original film made it believable in a way that this one doesn’t, and a couple of moments here are pretty hard to swallow. (One unfortunate soul apparently goes to sleep while swimming laps in a pool.)
In that light, the mythos of the original movie is very much safe from being overshadowed by the updated version, but it’s hard to deny how effective the remake is. Besides, with remakes turning up all over the place, a reimagining of “A Nightmare on Elm Street” seems like a no-brainer. That it opened big at the box office is no surprise, though that doesn’t necessarily mean Freddy’s coming back anytime soon. As a matter of fact, the producer of last year’s “Friday the 13th” remake said that the sequel is stuck in development hell. Not a good sign.
This article originally appeared at AllMediaNY.com.
This movie was so bad! I am sorry, but I was truly excited to see this in theaters and it was such a disappointment. The movie was short, rushed, and so predictable. Freddy looked more like a mummy than was burned. It was not as bloody as expected, and did not have shocking scenes as you would expect. I enjoyed the older ones much more (even as a child)!