A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

A Nightmare on Elm Street is a movie of should-have-beens.  It was a financial success, much more so than Friday the 13th, which tanked after a huge opening weekend.  In fact, this remake of the 1984 film is one of the most profitable horror films of all time.  Jackie Earle Haley, who replaces Robert Englund as Freddy Krueger, did so with Englund's blessing.  Director Samuel Bayer was talked into doing the film by Michael Bay after holding off on doing any of the horror remakes with the promise that his feature debut was going to be the beginning of many good things.  It even had Rooney Mara, a young up-and-coming star at the time, in the lead role of Nancy.

What it didn't have was the backing of fans of the original.  Platinum Dunes was becoming known as the studio that did horror remakes.  Horror films were not doing too well in the 2000s and the constant reboots and retreads didn't do them any favors and, by the time A Nightmare on Elm Street made it to the theaters, many fans were fed up.  It didn't help that New Line did what they could to try to screw Wes Craven out of royalties for the characters.  Despite its financial success the backlash was so strong that what was supposed to be the beginning of a new string of Freddy movies became a near-ruin for the Michael Bay's studio.

Dean Russell (Kellan Lutz) is experiencing nightmares about a burned man with knives for fingers.  Though he makes an effort to stay awake he falls asleep and apparently kills himself in front of his best friend Kris (Katie Cassidy).  Soon she starts having nightmares as well and becomes curious when, at the funeral, she sees pictures of herself as a child with Dean, although she believes that she never met him until high school.  Kris is not the only one, as her ex-boyfriend Jesse (Thomas Dekker) and friends Quintin (Kyle Gallner) and Nancy are having them, too. 

It soon surfaces that the killer is a man named Freddy Krueger.  He was the gardener at a preschool and, when the parents found evidence that he was molesting their children, took justice into their own hands.  In revenge Freddy has returned and found a way to use the world of dreams to take revenge.  Quintin and Nancy soon discover where they must go, and what they must do, to bring him into the real world and banish him once and for all. 

There was an effort to make Freddy look more like a real-life burn victim than he did in the original but, somehow, it ended up looking like a bad Halloween mask.  Making it partially a green screen to do CGI effects on didn't help to make it much better.  Being a child molester, rather than murderer, was part of the original script of A Nightmare on Elm Street, but was changed by Wes Craven to temper the dark tone of the story.  Jackie Earle Haley makes the character his own, not trying to imitate Robert Englund, and comes across as creepy as intended.

The acting isn't bad and Rooney Mara is pretty good as Nancy.  The story itself doesn't deviate much from the original and where it does it is not anything that seeks to tear down or destroy the 1984 film.  On the contrary, Samuel Bayer and writers Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer tried to be as respectful to Craven's vision as possible, and that seems to be their undoing.  Too many scenes either reference the first four movies, just with computer graphics instead of practical effects.  It doesn't look terrible but there is no sense of creativity or a desire to go beyond just reframing various highlights from the classic version.  The best stuff in the movie is still the original ideas that Craven came up with, and the movie often feels like a version of Freddy's Nightmares produced by the CW. 

The biggest problem is that, since there is no effort to do anything new with the story or Freddy, the remake is rendered unnecessary.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was at least a reboot of a 30-year-old movie.  A Nightmare on Elm Street was something my generation, and the one after it, pretty much knew by heart.  As a result, Bayer hasn't directed a feature film since, and Platinum Dunes itself, after a time of being ignored in the industry, decided their future was not in remakes but in originals.  

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Time: 95 minutes

Starring: Rooney Mara, Kyle Gallner, Katie Cassidy, Jackie Earle Haley

Director: Samuel Bayer