Screenplay by and Directed by Rod Laurie

Cast
James Marsden as David Sumner
Kate Bosworth as Amy Sumner
Alexander Skarsgard as Charlie
James Woods as Tom Heddon
Dominic Purcell as Jeremy Niles

Rated R for strong brutal violence including a sexual attack, menace, some sexual content, and pervasive language

People are always telling me I didn’t like movies they did because I “overthought” them.  “It’s just Muppets, man, they’re just supposed to be cute!”  That sort of thing.  But even if that’s true, there are also a lot of movies I give a better shake than they probably deserve because I overthink them.  Exhibit A:  Rod Laurie’s remake of Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 audience-divider Straw Dogs (having been born the following year, I’ve never seen it).  This is, by any objective measure, a God-awful movie led by the most egregious examples ever of people who practically got down on their hands and knees and begged to be attacked by crazed hicks.  But yet… director Rod Laurie’s fairly good track record of movies about politics and ethics kept my brain buzzing:  is there more to Straw Dogs than just a bunch of idiots ground up in the gears of a manipulative screenplay?  Could this all be a theater of the absurd metaphor, a call to arms for liberals who alternately provoke and cower from their conservative opponents to get off their asses and fight?  Who can really say, and even if it is, there’s just no defending the third-rate subplot where poor Dominic Purcell is forced to go Full Retard in reenacting all the worse parts of Of Mice and Men by way of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.  But the mental exercise of looking for a second level to Straw Dogs kept me diverted in a way you probably won’t be while waiting for an entertainingly audacious finale full of sharp objects going through parts of rednecks they ain’t supposed to be a’puncturin’.  And yes, in that spirit, there is at least one image in the last five minutes that will make you glad you sat through this mess.

Screenwriter David Sumner (James Marsden) and his actress wife Amy (Kate Bosworth) move back to her hometown of Blackwater, Mississippi (apparently Backwater, Mississippi was just too on-the-nose) to rebuild her late father’s house.  He hopes this will allow him solitude to work on a screenplay he’s been hired to write about the Russian front in the Second World War.  The Sumners need someone to do some roofing work on the house and against all common sense, David accepts the low bid of Amy’s creepy old boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard).  In no time, Charlie and his redneck crew are showing up at ridiculously early hours and blaring loud music all day.  David’s hesitant to confront them about these issues or their constant leering at a disgusted Amy, which for some reason inspires her to get dressed with her bedroom window open so they can watch.  The increasingly hostile roofers keep pushing David into the rituals of their hometown, from an awkward church service to a hunting trip where he’s almost killed.  And then, Amy is raped.  When a lynch mob after mentally challenged Jeremy (Dominic Purcell) shows up on their doorstep, David will have to finally decide what he’s willing to do to defend his home.

David and Amy are played by two very likable actors trying their best, but there’s no way around the fact that these are two seriously unlikable characters.  A little boilerplate dialog explains why they’re moving to Blackwater to start with, but none of those rationalizations makes sense for more than a holiday (Seriously, who gets a job writing a big-budget Hollywood movie and then moves to their wife’s hometown to work on the screenplay?  Has Amy given up acting?  Are they on the run from the IRS?).  They don’t seem like a terribly close couple, she doesn’t seem the least bit interested in returning to her hometown (so why not move back to his?) and, well, she reacts to just about everything like a raging hobag.  David, meanwhile, is a satchel full of the worst liberal traits, afraid to stand up for himself but not afraid to show up in a church in a strange town and then make a show of walking out in the middle of the service because “It’s not my thing.”  Forget blues vs. reds, nuke the whole town!

Skarsgard leads a very effective bunch of nasty hillbillies, and James Woods gets to air it out as the deposed football coach turned town drunk.  Amazingly, this town is so backwards that Walton Goggins is cast as one of its most sensible residents.  And then there’s Purcell, who has all the tools to dominate as an action hero but keeps either getting bad offers or making bad choices, because no one who’s been offered an acting job in the last five years should have willingly agreed to play Jeremy.  Apparently, everyone hides the mentally challenged in Hollywood because filmmakers keep thinking this is what they look like, but as this dimwitted male model drifts through town, he’s pursued by Woods’ daughter Janice (Willa Holland, who grabs the role and runs with it, radiating such pure harlotry she could very well have played this role under the direction of Cecil B. DeMille) until he finally gives in to his genetically encoded need to pet her like the rabbits.  Yeesh!  

I KNOW Laurie (best known for the self-important Oscar nominee The Contender, but also the director of little-seen good movies like Deterrence and Resurrecting the Champ) means for all this to mean something more than a bunch of losers playing a zero sum game with a bear trap.   The best spin you can put on Straw Dogs is to view it as a metaphor for the passive aggressive stupidity with which the political left tries to stand up for itself against the right, seeming to always pick the wrong fights and let the hanging curves sail by.  But the harder the movie works to make its subtext into text, the worse things get, as in a ridiculous sequence that juxtaposes rape and high school football.  Things go best when the namby-pambiness is kept to a minimum:  after all, what good liberal doesn’t want to see somebody put a rhetorical nail through Glenn Beck’s hand, er, arguments?

And it’s only once the hands start getting nailed and we start wondering just when David’s going to remember that bear trap hanging on his wall that Straw Dogs finally develops some genuine entertainment value.  Marsden does a really good job of throwing a Killing Machine switch developed through sheer aggravation and the climactic action is an enthusiastically bloody mess.  Who’d have thought Laurie would have such effectively repressed cinematic rage?

Straw Dogs is the kind of movie you just can’t believe is really as bad as it is:  its accumulating stack of absurd incidents certainly holds a person’s attention and the climax is duly rousing, but when you try to do the mental math, these characters give “dated” a bad name.  But, hey, it’s a fun movie to try and rationalize, so overthink your little hearts out!