Straw Dogs

Directed by Rod Lurie

(R)

**

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Rod Lurie’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s controversial 1971 thriller “doesn’t quite succeed on its own,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “The story does not cohere, and the performances are uneven.” Like the original, though, it makes an intriguing conversation piece. James Marsden and Kate Bosworth replace Dustin Hoffman and Susan George as a couple who seek the quiet life by moving to the wife’s small hometown, only to have their liberal values challenged when they’re terrorized by the town’s locals. But while the original was a “violent and virtuoso bit of filmmaking,” the remake has been “sanitized and stripped of all complexity,” said Alison Willmore in Movieline.com. Framed simply as a red state versus blue state culture clash, it’s “as empty as a used piñata.” Where the original played as a bracing argument about man’s innate savagery, this version is “a rote revenge thriller,” said Keith Phipps in the A.V. Club. The violence and sexual aggression here are “pure applause bait, which makes it barbaric in ways Peckinpah would never have dreamed.”