Crazy Little Thing

When it first opened a few weeks back, I passed on The Crazies, the new remake of the George Romero 1970s film. But then it sort of "wore me down," and today I went out to the theater to catch it.

"Wore me down" isn't quite the right phrase. I did want to see the movie. I passed initially because I was somewhat skeptical from the trailer. But the word of mouth on it was pretty good. Plus, the star was Timothy Olyphant. Loved him in Deadwood, of course, and I've seen him elevate his share of "probably shouldn't have been good, but it kind of was" movies, like A Perfect Getaway.

With all the zombie movies around these days, any new entry in the field (even if it is a remake) needs to have a spin on it. There, Zombieland excelled by coming at it from a comedic angle. The Crazies comes at it by having the enemy not be zombies -- not exactly. The victims of the strange virus in this film slowly lose their minds, and ultimately become very zombie-like killing machines. But they never completely lose their intelligence, keep them a thinking menace. They also don't always completely lose the personality they had as people either, keeping them a reminder that the folks coming at you were "the folks next door" just a short while ago. It's an interesting enough take on the subject to set The Crazies in new territory as it gets underway.

It manages to stay in this good space for quite some time, too. A number of sequences in the first half of the movie are very cleverly devised. They amp the suspense, and present some just plain unsettling situations; they don't rely on conventional make-you-jump scares, and never come at you with a sequence that would have worked in just any other zombie film.

But alas, the originality (if you can call it that, being a remake) and creativity dry up somewhere around the halfway mark. It's as though the writing process began with these few cool sequences in mind, but without a clear idea of the film's final destination. And left with the need to fill 45 more minutes of screen time with something, the script starts falling back on all the sad tropes of the genre.

The last truly suspenseful, horrific sequence occurs somewhere in act two, and from there, it's a non-stop parade of "you've seen this before." Suspense is dropped in favor of loud music stings and quick camera cuts, conspiring to make you jump rather than make your skin crawl. Plot holes spring open like the films is tearing at the seams. (So, they're just hanging out in a random car wash somewhere in case someone comes in worth attacking? And how exactly is these disease transferred, because it seems to me that if our hero didn't have it before, he'd surely have it after one particular sequence in the movie -- no matter how bad-ass it makes him look.) The film even starts to copy itself, pulling the same "character doesn't see what we the audience see as the camera pans across the background" schtick in act three that it used on us in act two.

It's a real shame the movie couldn't make good on the promise it showed so early on. I wouldn't say it ended up being something to avoid, but neither is it something I can recommend overall. I rate it a C+.