Review: 'Red Dawn' starring Chris Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson

The original Red Dawn remains a cult favorite for many of a certain age, despite the fact that it's one of the sillier action films of the 1980s. With a fresh-faced young cast of future Brat Packers in an unabashedly jingoistic, flag-waving exercise steeped in Cold War xenophobia, the film was at least topical even if it was ridiculous. And despite it all there remained a sense of fun to it. But the remake isn't fun, nor is it topical, well-acted or even all that patriotic.  It's a stinking example of Hollywood's remake craze gone terribly awry, sapping everything that made the 1984 film work and replacing it with a stock action film with absolutely nothing new to say.

Red Dawn's production history is well-known at this point, finished back in 2010 but falling victim to MGM's bankruptcy woes. The time gap proves to be a double-edged sword, as the film is more easily marketable with stars Chris Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson leading their own individual franchises, but it's clear they aren't fully formed actors yet. Hemsworth shows flashes of the guy who would eventually wield thunder for Marvel and lead Snow White to safety, but Hutcherson's pretty terrible. Nowhere near as awful as co-star Isabel Lucas, who might as well be the world's prettiest storefront mannequin. The rest of the young cast of up 'n comers includes Adrianne Palicki, Josh Peck, and Connor Cruise in what will hopefully be his swansong.

During the two years the film sat in a backroom gathering dust, the questionable decision was made to digitally change the insurgent army from Chinese to North Korean, although somebody forgot to change the characters' names to reflect it. The casual tweaking of such a major plot point shows the utter lack of devotion to any sort of political statement, which is then reflected in the story's lack of direction. This is less a story about how extreme adversity through war changes the young into hardened soldiers as it is a random collection of action scenes, broken up by the occasional chant of "Wolverines"!!.

Perhaps more unbelievable than the idea North Korea could catch us so flat-footed they could ever invade our soil is the plausibility of Hemsworth and Peck ever being brothers. They play the Eckert boys, Jed and Matt, whose lives in small-town Spokane revolve around football and drinking at the bar on game nights. Just having returned from service in the military, Jed is the apple of his father's eye, while Matt is a rebel with a selfish streak a mile long. Waking up one morning to the sobering sight of fighter planes flying overhead, they find their town is ground zero for a full-scale invasion, and along with a few of their friends hightail it for the woods to begin their lives as guerrilla fighters.

Do they experience any growing pains going from their cozy lives to hardened warriors? Sure, but nothing so serious it couldn't be resolved via a thirty second montage. Why waste time letting us get to know these characters when there's stuff that needs to be blown up? This lack of attention to character detail is never more prevalent than with the females, who are there merely as window dressing. Palicki, who is undoubtedly a very attractive woman, is basically only there because she looks good in a pair of jeans. The script by Carls Elsworth and Jeremy Passmore makes a crucial error by linking all of the principle characters together via some sort of relationship. There's no camaraderie here, and not attempt to build any. The most well-rounded character of them all turns out to be a relatively minor one, a member of the Wolverines played by Alyssa Diaz. But since she's not on the posters we kinda know what her fate is going to be well in advance.

But it's the villains who get the worst treatment of all. We're introduced to the powder keg of international politics via an effective assemblage of news reel footage in the film's opening segments, but once the invasion actually begins we know next to nothing about why North Korea would ever invade us. Will Yun Lee plays the stony faced "leader" of the invading army, but he's all scowls and evil and barely utters a word. In fact, the North Koreans don't really do much at all, and considering they were so easily able to bust onto our soil their inability to secure a few city blocks is absurd. It's not the typical "action movie villain incompetence" we're used to, this is just lazy writing that clashes horribly with a film that's trying really hard to be edgy and realistic. This is Battle: Los Angeles without the benefit of cool looking aliens.

Dan Bradley has proven in the past to be an excellent stunt coordinator in the past, working on such films as Mission: Impossible-Ghost Protocol and The Bourne trilogy, but as a director his action sequences are poorly staged and repetitive, with frenetic editing that is more confusing than exciting. Red Dawn looks as if it was developed by a bunch of frat boys who had played one too many first-person shooters. In fact, they may have been trying to tell us just that with this "lively" exchange between two of the Wolverines....

 "I miss 'Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare.'"
 
"Your life is 'Call Of Duty' now. And it sucks."