Straw Dogs

When Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs was released in 1971, its gruesome, explicit exploration of violence and the true nature of man made it one of the most controversial films of its time. So how do you update this Oscar-nominated film for a generation more prone to violence?

Writer/director Rod Lurie does a poor job. Immediately, Lurie cuts dialogue in favor of drawn-out reaction shots meant to imply marital strife as Los Angeles-based screenwriter David Sumner (James Marsden) and wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) relocate to her small Mississippi hometown. The focus on slow, deliberate shots—which continue with the introduction of Amy’s ex, Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard), and his “redneck” friends—is intended to imbue Straw Dogs with artful, reserved suspense. But hints at the coming violence gradually grow dull, and the film unfolds painfully slowly as a result.

Charlie’s emergent antagonism kicks the film into a higher, more engaging gear. Still, Lurie insists on representing his characters’ mental deterioration visually, rather than through dialogue. Despite the vivid cinematography, these shots fail to add enough anxiety and urgency to the atmosphere. As the movie approaches its unsurprisingly violent finale, the audience is left confused and disengaged with the film’s central theme: violence as a result of human inability to communicate. Instead, we linger merely to watch the brutality promised to us in the trailer. In a last effort to top his successor, Lurie intensifies the violence in the final sequence in desperate search of the shock value that characterized Peckinpah’s original. However, the ending is mismatched with the pace of the 100 minutes preceding it, and the brutality exhibited by Straw Dogs’ characters is scarcely validated by the hostility that Lurie has unsuccessfully attempted to establish.

Lurie’s attempt to remake this film with a unique perspective and more artful use of cinematography irrevocably clouds the movie, marking it inferior to the more provocative 1971 version.