Bringing Down the House Review
by Robin Clifford (robin AT reelingreviews DOT com)October 7th, 2002
"The Ring"
In 1998 a Japanese horror film named "Ringu," by Hideo Nakata, was released and, because of its originality and genuine spookiness, attained a considerable cult following. It is the story of an urban legend - when you watch a certain surreal videotape of disjointed images, you will receive a phone call and a croaking voice tells you that you have seven days to live. Numbers of young people have died in strange, horrific ways and it's up to one woman, a reporter, to get to the bottom of the mystery. Director Gore Verbinski remakes that very haunting horror flick in his western adaptation called "The Ring."
The original rendering of "The Ring" is a truly frightening horror movie that uses its grainy video images to good stead in developing a gut-twisting unfolding that made me not want to watch it alone, in the dark, late on a stormy, lightning punctuated night. Unfortunately, Verbinski's remake does not have the original's qualities that make a horror film horrific, even though the two films begin identically.
Naomi Watts follows up her starring debut in David Lynch's "Mulholland Drive" in what is a lackluster performance in an equally lackluster film. It's not that Watts is bad as the character of investigative journalist Rachel Keller trying to get to the bottom of the spate of particularly hideous deaths by fright. It seems more likely that the material does not lend itself to the development of characters. For example, when the mother of a victim pleads with Rachel that her background makes her the perfect person to get to the bottom of the mayhem, it takes 15 minutes before we find out she's a newspaper reporter. Watts takes a backseat to the "story" and reps a poor follow up to her starring debut.
In the original, there is a little boy, the son of the heroine, but the kid is kind of vacuous and doesn't lend much to the film. In the remake, young Rory Culkin puts some meat into the character of Aidan Keller who is a sort of conduit between two worlds. Veteran thespian Brian Cox plays a character that is supposed to have some significance (character not in the original) but lacks definition. His demise is provided by an overkill (pun intended) of electronics that made me think of a Monty Python skit, not a good image for a horror film.
The story starts off identically to the original, almost scene for scene, but departs from the simple, direct tale and adds "depth" by trying to make the story more complex. The result is a film that lacks the coherence, and the subsequent horror, of the Japanese oeuvre and made me just want to get the thing over with. I give it a C-.
For more Reeling reviews visit www.reelingreviews.com
[email protected]
[email protected]
More on 'Bringing Down the House'...
Originally posted in the rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup. Copyright belongs to original author unless otherwise stated. We take no responsibilities nor do we endorse the contents of this review.
