The Hitcher (R)
Scott:
Scott: Tonight I am reviewing The Hitcher
, the remake of the 1986 film that started C. Thomas Howell and Rutger Hauer as the hitcher. This movie finds Sean Bean playing the hitchhiking John Ryder.
Scott: What did I think about this?
It was ok. There were some scenes where I really dug the action on the screen and there were others where the audience and I groaned because of the absurdity on the screen. In the intro of the movie you meet college student Grace Andrews (Sophia Bush) and possible college student Jim Halsey (Zachary Knighton). They are going to spring break at Lake Havasu (made famous in Girls Gone Wild videos).
The first song you hear is Move Along by The All-American Rejects. You hear this during the opening credits and then it just keeps going and going. I think the song is in the movie longer than its actual length.
Once that song finally ends, we see the hitcher for the first time. Sean Bean really plays the role well. He has the look of trust the character requires to draw in his victims and he also looks very happy while being very sadistic. He has appeared in a bunch of movies you have heard of; the most memorable for me were National Treasure and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.
Early in the movie we visit Buford Store and meet the clerk there played by Kyle Davis. Normally these characters are just thrown in to move the movie along. While that is the case here, I enjoyed our time with Davis. Meeting the clerk was one of the best scenes in the movie; he’s one of the better and more convincing backwoods clerks I have seen.
As you’ve seen in the trailers Grace and Jim pick up John Ryder and things don’t go too well for them after that. For some reason Ryder really doesn’t like these two college aged kids and he harasses them from that point on throughout the movie. You never really understand his reason for the harassment, and you wonder if all stems from that first chance meeting on the road.
The movie is marketed as more of a thriller or even horror-type movie. It really doesn’t deliver on either of those two genres. You can count on one hand the number of ‘gotcha’ scenes and the bloody/gory scenes are comical at times. It never gets established as a thriller and ends up as more of a mystery movie to me. How is he tracking these people across the desert? Did he implant them with a GPS tracking device? What happened to Grace’s cell phone? Those questions and other we never have answered. All we have is a bad guy who likes to hurt people because the original bad guy in the original movie did that.
This movie was directed by Dave Meyers, who is best known for being a music video director. In videos, as in short stories, you really don’t have time to introduce the characters and show who they really are. I think he brought that video experience over to this movie, and that left the characters too hollow for you to care what happens to them. So, while there was a good sized body count, the impact of the deaths was less and less as the movie progressed.
Scott: What did I think of movie?
I give it a 2.5 overall, it was so-so at best. There was one scene that I really liked, it was kind of like WWtBD (What would the Bandit do?). For a horror/thriller movie I give it a 1.5. I wasn’t that thrilled and I certainly wasn’t scared.
