A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010) Why?
I have to say something about this one—it’s pretty much impossible to find anything good here—this movie is an absolute train wreck. To start with the good stuff—which won't take long—you get that iconic melody (thank God they didn't turn it into some hip-hop remix), and a few dream sequences actually have a decent atmosphere, and... yeah, that's about it.
What really fails is—well, the total butchering of the original. Every single character is so unlikable that you’re practically rooting for Freddy's knives to find them... they're irritating to a degree you rarely see in cinema. Everyone is trying so hard to be "trendy," like they're from some Sex and the City wannabe generation, all the cool poses and looks—it's almost unwatchable. Nancy has basically turned into Bella Swan from Twilight, some weird school geek who's—well, you know—in some kind of mess, and Glen is just a loser, some hip-hop kid type replacing what should have been a Johnny Depp vibe... everyone is acting all edgy and depressed and "alternative," like they've already dealt with nightmare issues and know everything... and half of them look like they just wandered off the set of Melrose Place. Then there's the fact that the whole movie is just a patchwork of scenes ripped from the original. They swapped roles around, so now Tina / Kriss is the one with the massive classroom scene (since Nancy doesn't even exist in this version). That famous ceiling slaughter scene—I mean, how do you even mess that up? Basically, Tina / Kriss is FLYING across the ceiling like Spider-Man—one quick cut (softened, apparently, so we don't ruin the lead actress's hair)—and that's it. The rest is just stacking stupidity on top of stupidity and straight-up copying entire sequences from the original...
As for Freddy Krueger—that's a whole other issue. Look, I have nothing against Jack Earl Haley as an actor, but this isn't the role for him—the guy is barely five feet tall and thin, and all the other actors tower over him. His voice is a chronic rasp, a pathetic attempt at imitating Englund's intonation (kudos to the writers, though, since they didn't give him a single smart line like the old Freddy had) and when that fails, he just drifts into a Ledger-style Joker vibe. And the look? It's a joke. Freddy ended up looking like some little gray cartoon alien—his face literally reminds me of those caricatures. He carries himself like a wet hen—there's none of that "I'm gonna slice you up, kid" swagger left... honestly, I regret watching the original series before this because this version of Freddy is just... well, it says a lot about the movie that Wes Craven, Robert Shaye, Robert Englund, and everyone else who built the first film wouldn't want any association with this mess.
So—this movie is for the generation that turned Twilight into some hazy blockbuster hit. The characters are tailor-made to mimic that specific vibe—the new Jesse is basically Edward Cullen with that exact stare and look... the horror is just there for show, you know, just so those kids can feel like they're dealing with "real problems"... it's ugly, just plain ugly what they did to this film. Michael Bay should probably be legally banned from touching classic franchises because he always manages to screw them up completely. A massive, highly generous score of
2/10
