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Reviews
Brace positions, please, for the 21st-century recurrence of A Nightmare on Elm Street, Wes Craven's antique tale of the snickering burns victim who kills you in your sleep. Jackie Earle Haley is the new Freddy Krueger, less camp and more scary than the Robert Englund version, as he slices and dices his way through a cast of exhausted all-Americans. Does it matter that the plot is little more than a cynical, machine-tooled retread of the 1984 original? Debut director Samuel Bayer was not hired to dismantle the franchise but to shoot it afresh. He gives us a film in which the teens are screaming and the blood is flowing; a steel-jawed little man-trap tucked just beneath the duvet. Anything less would be a dereliction of duty.
By Xan Brooks
The entire storyline is a complete rip-off from the original with a few slight differences. Instead of Freddy killing the children, he sexually molests them, a topic that would have caused a controversy back then. The complete lack of imagination to separate this from the original is the critical downfall of this film. It's just plain boring. I had absolutely no remorse for any of the teens who died. There was no build up of suspense or noticeable creepy music to offset the action.
Haley as Freddy does give this tired old character a new perspective and look, but to anyone who has seen the originals, it just doesn't hold up to Englund. The teen stars, Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner, Thomas Dekker, Katie Cassidy, and Kellan Lutz all sleepwalk through the film and are there only to be more victims for Freddy.
By Michael Black
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