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A Nightmare on Elm Street was the film that put New Line Cinema on the map. The first Wes Craven flick introduced Freddy Krueger to movie audiences, going from a macabre dream demon to eventually a punchline in the later flicks. It always seemed that the odd numbered Nightmare flicks were better than the even ones. To drive the death nail into the franchise, Freddy fought Jason much like the Universal monsters before they were usurped by Abbott and Costello. Well, nothing can save a franchise more these days than going back to the beginning. So, we now have the re-imagining of Freddy Krueger for a new generation in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The story re-boots the franchise. The film opens with Dean (Kellan Lutz) at a diner, fighting off sleep. Kris (Katie Cassidy) enters and he admits that a mysteriously burned and bruised figure has been haunting his dreams. As he struggles to stay awake, the killer in his dreams plunges his gloved and razored hand into the neck of Dean. When Dean dies in his dream, he dies in real life. Kris is just shocked by what she has seen.
At Dean’s funeral, we get our cast of characters. There is Nancy (Rooney Mara), the waitress at the diner, and Quentin (Kyle Gallner), the young man with a crush on her. His buddy is Jesse (Thomas Dekker), recently broken up with Kris. It seems that all of these kids have been having the same dreams of an evil man trying to kill them. They also dream of their pre-kindergarten childhoods, something that none of them remembers. Nancy feels that there is something in their past that connects them to this Freddy character. It drags to the surface a dark secret that concerns the parents of the victims.
The kids are all just lambs for the slaughter, waiting their turns to be butchered. It doesn’t take much acting as it does reacting in a movie like Nightmare. Both the female leads are stereotypes, the blonde popular girl (Katie) and the dark arty mouse (Rooney). We know that only one of them will make it to reel six. The guys are also from Central Casting, typical jocks and geeks, all trying not to die along the way.
In a film like this there are only two questions. How is the bad guy? How are the deaths?
Jackie Earle Haley is proving again and again that his Oscar nomination was not a fluke. Here he embodies one of the most iconic characters in horror cinema and makes it his own. Though he does seem to channel a bit too much from his Watchman character into Freddy, he tries to deliver those comic beats the role is known for. While some of the jokes work, most just fall flat. Freddy became funnier as the flicks went along, as the audience grew with the character. But the problem is the basic context of Freddy as he is written here. While we learned the tragedy that befell the older classic Krueger, this time out it is more forced into an uncomfortable place. To root for this Freddy is to root for a suspected pedophile and not a wronged man. The exercise comes across more creepy than cathartic.
While the deaths are neat, we really needed to see much more of them. The film just plods along, with the audience waiting and wanting to see buckets of blood and bile. Here there are way too many passages without action, without pace. Director Samuel Bayer is no Wes Craven and never finds the right beat with the material. He delivers maybe three great jolts in the nearly two hours of Krueger-land
As much as I’m getting tired of re-makes, I was really looking forward to this new Nightmare. The sum of the parts didn’t add up to a great whole. While Jackie Earle Haley delivers with his role, the rest of the film is just another slash to make box office cash.
