Film Review: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

The main problem a remake faces is that the film has already been made, and its success fully depends on if the film is better or worse. In the case of A Nightmare on Elm Street, it's the latter. The film takes the same plot as the original, with a dead child molester killing teenagers in their dreams, but if they die in their dreams they die in real life.

Filling the role of villainous Freddy Krueger is Jackie Earle Haley (Watchmen), who does an amazing job with the role, and had me squirming in my seat on more than one occasion. Other that the film isn't really too horrifying, offering little more than a few cheap scares that the audience gets used to after a few times. The key deficiency of the film is the script, which is painfully predictable for a horror movie, and takes absolutely no time to build suspense or develope the characters.

The first murder is commited within the first 10 minutes. It's very much like the opening of Star Trek, in that the guy who dies looks a lot like Chris Pine without actually being Chris Pine, except you don't actually care about the dead guy when it's all over. For that matter you don't really care about any of the characters when they die. The film offers some nice death scenes, but they've already been used in the previous films. It makes little sense to see a horror remake if they don't do it better than the original.

One would think that given the technology of today they'd really go out there with the dream killings. After all these people are dying in their dreams. There are endless possibilities there, and the film takes absolutely none of them. The only one that was actually really clever was the one that ended the film. This film has all of the plot points from the original, but none of the substance or believability.

D+