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38A closing scene, rousingly patriotic, takes place back on the football field. I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.
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50The best segments of the film occur early, as the setting is established with a dose of "Friday Night Lights" normalcy followed by an invasion that recalls "Independence Day."
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25Unfortunately, the characters are so programmatic, the premise so ridiculous and the situations so far-fetched even if you accept that premise that no energy can be built, and the little that's there can't be sustained. Red Dawn is a vigorous but pointless exercise.
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20In this group, only Hemsworth stands out.
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50Thor's Chris Hemsworth leads the pack as a high school football star-turned-Marine, while Josh Peck plays his stubborn younger brother. There's also a collection of junior guerrillas, including The Hunger Games' Josh Hutcherson and Friday Night Lights' Adrianne Palicki. Take that, screaming North Koreans with no agenda!
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50Only those with paranoid fantasies of an en masse invasion on American soil will find Red Dawn remotely powerful. The concept should have been updated to allow for more complex and surreptitious kinds of warfare.
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38Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.
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30Although the original Red Dawn was far-fetched, the remake offers little but vicarious thrills.
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33Red Dawn without the jingoism is like a pie without the filling - it collapses into splintered mush.
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50Many of the original film's booby-trap scenarios are repeated here, but without Milius' grandiosity and nihilism. There's less of both in the new Red Dawn. It's not a disaster. It's just drab.
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38The filmmakers have altered the premise from the unlikely to the ridiculous.
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38The dull, predictable direction is the perfect match for a watery, nondescript cast.
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40In his debut the director, Dan Bradley, a stunt coordinator with a long list of credits, handles the low-fi action well, which helps divert attention from the bargain-bin special effects, bad acting and politics.
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50Ultimately, the problem with this Red Dawn is the same problem with the first one. Despite the more realistic battle scenes, nothing in it feels more fateful than a football game.
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50This version is unlikely to strike a similar chord with young audiences while severely disappointing older fans of the original.
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38This world is divided between the makers and the takers, and after just a few minutes of Red Dawn, you'll realize there's not much more you can take.
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60Despite the considerable impediment of a premise arguably even sillier than that of the original "Red Dawn," helmer Dan Bradley's long-delayed remake of John Milius' 1984 kids-vs.-Commies adventure delivers enough thrilling action sequences and rock-'em, sock-'em fantasy-fulfillment to amp its B.O. potential.
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40A new Red Dawn could have been so much more fun had it thrown a properly out-of-bounds tea party. (It lacks the signature brawn of original director John Milius, a guns-first libertarian.)
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30Could be fun, you might think. No. Bad acting and worse dialogue quickly put an end to that notion.
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42It's enough to make Kim Jong ill.
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40Single-mindedly action-oriented to the point where Milius's film seems relatively ruminative.
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30If it weren't for him (Hemsworth), surely the Red Dawn remake would have gone straight to video; he's the only person worth watching in it (oh the pain of watching the wan Isabel Lucas hoist a rocket launcher).
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20This has to be the year's most pointless remake: a boring and badly acted reboot of John Milius's gung-ho red-scare actioner from 1984.
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30The new Red Dawn's body count is as high as its predecessor's. But the fatalism in all of Milius' projects - even the silliest ones - has weight. That's not the case with the remake, whose portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.
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50As a combat action spectacle, the movie takes a straightforward, gritty approach that makes for mostly solid viewing.
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67It's easy to take most films' war-torn elsewheres for granted, and taken on its own merits, Red Dawn is a victory of small battles and heavy artillery, sentimental but rarely too hackneyed, energetic without becoming too silly.
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40The doltish, messy and frequently incoherent result bears all the hallmarks of a botched and compromised endeavour.
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Mar 11, 201320Long-delayed. Arguably not long enough.
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Nov 23, 201225The movie never pauses -- at least, not to waste time on anything like developing the female characters. But there's no edge to anything, either dramatically or politically.
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Nov 21, 201210Love it or hate it, Milius's original Red Dawn looks like an Akira Kurosawa masterpiece next to this latest iteration, directed by Dan Bradley.