Friday the 13th (Marcus Nispel, 2009)

You can be forgiven for not knowing that the depraved serial killer Jason Voorhees appeared only peripherally as a deformed young boy in the original Friday the 13th (1980). But fans of the series know that Jason's mother was responsible for the slaughter of the now-standard cabal of generic, sex-crazed teenagers in the original—the entirety of which is summed up in the first few minutes of this version—so this is more an update than it is a remake. The whole thing feels a little paint-by-numbers and designed by committee; you get the feeling that everyone here is unified in their ideology of performing a job-for-hire, strictly because there’s money to be made, the only thing at stake being performing dutifully enough to ensure future employment. But there’s one great moment of invention in Friday the 13th's screenplay when, about 20 minutes in, after Jason has dispatched with what the viewer can be forgiven for thinking is the group whose journey we will follow through to the film’s conclusion, the title is introduced, revealing the preceding sequence to be a foreword. Not only is it impressive in its concept but also in its resourcefulness: by having two groups of teenagers to kill, there’s less time needed for plot development. Which is presumably a good thing, depending on whether your tolerance is higher for watching teens get stalked and mutilated by a madman than it is for excusing flimsy plot construction.

Though screenwriters Damien Shannon and Mark Swift offer a modest improvement over their screenplay for the D.O.A. Freddy vs. Jason—I liked that there were little homages to fans of (or at least those familiar with) the original series, such as Jason wearing as he did in Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) a pillow case (or burlap sack, whatever) over his head before finding, as he did in Friday the 13th Part 3 (1982), the hockey mask that would make him (and it) an icon—none of it is scary. Part of this is because all of the sets look constructed, Jason looks and moves like a stuntman, and the score is lousy. The multi-ethnic cast (the presence of which begs the question Is it progressive to allow blacks and Asians to be brutally murdered alongside their white peers? and, strangely, I think it may be) comprises a series of "types," the white kids included. (The most ridiculous and perplexing being the guy obviously meant to look like the screen persona of Seth Rogen, though with none of his awkward charisma or self-effacing sense of humor.)

The Friday the 13th movies have always seemed oddly puritanical and conservative in their values (smoke pot and fuck, you die) given their penchant for employing inventive forms of brutality. This notion is only complicated when you find yourself siding with the killer (a surrogate for imposing these values) due to the brash, obnoxious behavior of the callous teenagers. While it may indeed be brisker (and arguably better) than any of the films of the original series, it’s still pretty thin. And at 97 minutes, it feels way too long. Fairly generic and offering a bit of restraint, given the post-Saw world we live in, it's best not to expect much here, because that’s precisely what you’ll get.