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Profoundly disturbing, blood-chilling suspenser.
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67Despite its logy, red-herring structure, the film has enough enigma and weirdness that it gradually stirs to life.
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63As it is, LaBute has cleverly repurposed his creepy source material. This Wicker Man, which wasn't screened for critics, is a nutty atonement for the gender assaults of his filmmaking and playwriting past, including "In the Company of Men," "Your Friends & Neighbors," and "The Shape of Things."
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50Well intentioned, but only occasionally creepy.
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In the end, LaBute's remake is an interesting idea that never transforms into a particularly satisfying movie.
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50For this remake writer-director Neil LaBute has moved the action from Scotland to Washington State, added enough scares for Warner Brothers to market the movie as horror, and turned the story into an almost comically Wagnerian expression of the castration anxiety that snakes through his original screenplays.
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42The Wicker Man is too loony to be a drama, too earnest to be a comedy, too predictable to be a horror film.
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40Unlikely to inspire a passionate following similar to the original, the film, which opened Friday without being screened for the press, ultimately induces more titters than dread.
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40The Wicker Man isn't all that bad a movie; it's visually striking and ambitious in some ways. It just fails to bring enough to the table to fully distance itself from the original.
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40This wasn't a horror film the first time around, and LaBute makes sorry feints at effective creepiness, letting the story roam in circles just like Cage.
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40Any provocative questions LaBute might have wanted to raise are totally obscured as the rising tide of absurdity gradually overwhelms the entire enterprise.
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40In an era of careful cost accountancy and focus-group testing, it's remarkable that a movie as truly, deeply, madly foolish as The Wicker Man escaped the asylum. But we must be grateful for the endless guffaws and gasps and outright stunned silences it unleashes on lucky audiences.
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38As an allegory of religious conflict, the '73 film is brilliantly constructed and ends with a punctuation mark that was shocking in its day. LaBute's movie attempts to shock, as well, and does: Given the names involved and the casting of Cage, it is shockingly bad.
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38There may be a way to remake 1973's cult thriller The Wicker Man, in which a deeply Christian cop has his religious convictions shaken to the core as he investigates the disappearance of a child from within a cheerfully pagan community, but Neil LaBute didn't find it.
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38LaBute has transformed the eerie, disturbing psychological thriller into an unintentional comedy. At times, The Wicker Man is hilariously bad.
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33Turns a cultishly creepy classic into a dull and windy farce.
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30A movie like this can survive an absurd premise but not incompetent execution. And Mr. LaBute, never much of an artist with the camera, proves almost comically inept as a horror-movie technician...It's neither haunting nor amusing; just boring.
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25The Wicker Man is one of those "what were they thinking?" movies.
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20Do yourself a favor: Go rent Hardy's original film, watch it, and then try and get it out of your head. You never, ever will.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 12 out of 53
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Mixed: 9 out of 53
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Negative: 32 out of 53
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