In the very least, I didn't leave the theater feeling as annoyed as I did after the Friday the 13th remake. This was far from a perfect film, and just a few minor tweaks here and there would have greatly improved it a great deal. But overall, it could have been much worse, and it's not a bad springboard from which to launch a new franchise, even though the old one still probably had some life left in it.
Spoilers follow...
The Good
-- Jackie Earle Haley. It's hard to really evaluate his performance. I mean, I liked it well enough. He's sufficiently scary, and--to use one of Simon Cowell's favorite stupid phrases--he did a good job of making the role his own. I especially loved how he would rub the glove's blades together, almost in gleeful anticipation of slicing someone. But at the same time, it just...didn't seem like Freddy. Just as Englund's performance evolved over the course of the first few films, I'm sure Haley's will, too. But I'm hoping in the sequel(s), he gets to show a little more humor and personality.
-- The micro naps. I have no idea if this is real science or movie science, but they added an interesting new element towards the end of the movie, as Freddy would quickly pop in and out of existence. Nice touch.
-- The (brief) question of Freddy's guilt. I'm still wrestling with whether it would have been more interesting for Freddy to have actually been innocent of abusing the kids and butchering them out of revenge for lying, or if this element should have been left out altogether. And I suspect if they'd gone with the former, I would have been annoyed. Still, it was an interesting curve ball.
-- The "surprise" ending. I'm not a big fan of the original's ending, and anyone who saw it was undoubtedly expecting the remake to do something similar. But I thought the film pulled it off reasonably well. Fake-looking CGI blood and all.
The Bad
-- The other casting. At hot as Katie Cassidy is, she has as much business playing a high school student as I do. Rooney Mara couldn't have been a bigger stiff. Kyle Gallner and Thomas Dekker were just there. Granted, they didn't have the best material to work with, but still, I don't remember any of the actors from the previous films being this listless. Frankly, I'm surprised Freddy didn't just decide they were all too boring to kill, and go someplace else.
-- Way too much Freddy. For the first hour, he's all over the place as the film just jumps from one nightmare to another, as opposed to slowly building a sense of dread like the original did.
-- Making Freddy a child molester as opposed to a child killer. Okay, how can I put this without sounding pro-child molester? I've always thought child molesters were more sick than evil. They're obviously still scum and should be locked up, but in a way, you have to pity them. Indeed, in the flashback scenes, Haley plays Freddy as this sad, pathetic creature, unlike in the original, where Freddy was a psychopath with a basement full of knives and a boiler room full of dead kids. Freddy should be evil, not sick.
-- The final confrontation between Nancy and Freddy. One of the niftier parts of the original was the series of traps Nancy sets for Freddy after she pulls him out of the dream. In the remake, her big plan is basically for two sleep-deprived kids to take on a supernatural monster and hope for the best.
The Ugly
-- Uh...Elm Street? There's a reason the original was called A Nightmare on Elm Street instead of A Nightmare in Springwood. That street is what tied everything together: The vigilante mob that killed Freddy all lived on it, and their kids were the ones Freddy initially went after. No, in the big picture, leaving out this element doesn't matter much. But the traditionalist in me still thinks it's kind of an important thing to have changed.
-- A basic lack of understanding of the Internet. While Nancy is trying to track down other potential Freddy victims, she enters a really common name into the search engine--Lisa something or other--and the very first hit is a story about the Lisa she's looking for. Man, if Google only worked like that, cyber stalking would be so much easier. Also, when she finds another victim's video blog, not only was Freddy apparently nice enough to post the final vlog after he killed the kid in the middle of recording it, but it must be a really unpopular blog, since no one but Nancy seemed to view it. Imagine in real life if a kid started posting vlogs about how he was dreaming of being killed, then dies in the middle of recording one. That shit would at least make The Huffington Post.
-- The Freddy make-up. Did Englund occasionally ham it up, especially in the later films? Sure. But you still want to see Freddy's emote from time to time, which seems pretty much impossible with the make-up Haley has on.
Script: C
Acting: C+
Gore: B-
Overall: C+
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