Red dud

Red Dawn isn’t worth the energy it takes to sit through it.

A remake of the 1984 movie of the same name, I was pretty much expecting two things from it: either a crisply-made but morally-noxious film or a ridiculous but fun guilty pleasure. Regardless, I was prepared for the movie to elicit strong emotions.

Yet, that’s about the farthest away from what Red Dawn actually is. A poorly-made pastiche of bad acting, terrible screenwriting and awful product placement, it doesn’t really make you feel strongly about anything. Instead, it’s just a badly-made action film lacking the guts to answer any of the questions it asks.

Red Dawn is set in Spokane Washington, and focuses on two brothers, Matt Eckert (Josh Peck), a high school student and football player, and Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth), a marine on leave from service overseas.

Matt and Jed have a strained relationship, but they are soon faced with bigger problems as all the power goes out, followed by a massive invasion of North Korean paratroopers. Fleeing into the mountains with their friends, the Eckerts form a guerrilla organization called the Wolverines and start fighting against the invaders.

There’s so much wrong with Red Dawn that it’s difficult to know where to start.

To begin with, the acting is third-rate.

Hemsworth is a good actor, with strong performances this year in The Avengers and possibly the best movie of the year, The Cabin in the Woods. But in Red Dawn, he’s painfully wooden and stilted, a trait unfortunately shared with the rest of the cast.

The writing and directing here are also clear failures. A lot of events happen “just because,” and the action is lackluster and uninspired.

Then there’s the whole issue of realism. While I don’t expect every movie dealing with war to be Saving Private Ryan, there are far too many scenes in Red Dawn that are just way too implausible and knock you out of the action.

Then there’s the film’s product placement, which includes a scene at a Subway restaurant destroying any hope this movie had of being taken seriously.

This would be all well and good if Red Dawn was trying to be campy, but it plays it straight throughout and aspires to be a serious action film. Yet, disregarding the bad acting and poor screenwriting, what really does the movie in on this front is its lack of conviction.

Red Dawn has its fair share of noble speeches and patriotic rallying, but it never truly embraces this identity, shying away from talk of American exceptionalism and why the American way of life is worth fighting for.

Indeed, there is an intriguing bit of self-awareness in Red Dawn about the morally ambiguous nature of warfare itself, with Jed Eckert saying they are trying to create chaos and using the same tactics as the Viet Kong, while pointing out most of the invading soldiers don’t want to be there.

Unfortunately this sentiment isn’t taken to its logical conclusion, that war is a nasty and inglorious endeavor, even when justified, and is instead shoe-horned into a half-baked patriotic shell, where death and battle are way too clean.

So what’s good about Red Dawn? Well there’s an Asian-American marine (Ken Choi) who shows up towards the end of the movie who’s pretty awesome, as well as Adrianne Palicki, who’s hot in a high school crush kind of way, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who seems to have wandered in from a better film. Those are literally the only worthwhile things about this movie.

There is a quasi-silver lining to Red Dawn, however, and that is it’s not politically disgusting.

As a movie about communists invading the U.S., Red Dawn could have been a xenophobic, jingoistic, Glenn Beck-style wet dream, feeding into every paranoid fantasy the radical right has been fomenting for the past few decades. Europe, the UN, liberals and compromise were some of the things I was expecting to get eviscerated when I sat down to watch it.

Yet, Red Dawn is far too commercial and calculating to really defame, or stand for, anything. It’s just a bad movie, and you shouldn’t waste your time seeing it.

Posted by Bera B. Dunau on December 13, 2012. Filed under Arts and Entertainment,Columns,Movie Reviews,Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry