| 50 |
Premiere
Stephen Saito
The Hitcher's main problem is that many of the title character's dirty deeds are done off-camera. Instead of seeing Ryder trap his victims before he kills them, the audience is treated to plenty of butchered corpses that seem to magically appear after Ryder leaves a room.
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| 50 |
New York Post
The Hitcher is the Jessica Simpson of psycho killer flicks - cheerfully in touch with its own brainlessness.
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| 50 |
The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
Jason Anderson
The young couple is far less compelling, which is one reason why the remake is only intermittently effective. Bland and dim-witted, it's hard to see why they'd attract Ryder's wrath.
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| 42 |
Entertainment Weekly
A remake of the 1986 suspense ''classic,'' is as processed and hoot-worthy as the original.
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| 42 |
The Onion (A.V. Club)
Somehow, music-video veteran David Meyers fails to hurtle this project into the pantheon of great horror movies.
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| 38 |
TV Guide
Bean carves out his own modest variations on the theme of John Ryder-on-the-storm, but Bush and Knighton are so blandly forgettable that it's hard to believe that they're the protagonists and not Victims 1 and 2.
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| 38 |
ReelViews
This is a mechanical gore-fest that offers preposterous stunts in place of escalating tension and waxwork mannequins in place of marginally interesting characters.
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| 30 |
Los Angeles Times
Mark Olsen
The original film was intellectually engaging as well as tangibly creepy, while the new remake is just plain bad, and boring to boot.
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| 30 |
Film Threat
Reviewing it is a wholly meaningless exercise, but I do it against my better judgment that anyone even seeks a second opinion before plopping down their hard-earned money for garbage like this.
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| 30 |
LA Weekly
Jim Ridley
That leaves little to fill 83 expendable minutes, which barely register as a movie even with snazzy KNB gore effects, critic-baiting clips from "The Birds," a splattery variation on the '86 "Hitcher's" most notorious scene, and some out-of-place Bruckheimerisms on loan from producer Michael Bay.
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| 30 |
The New York Times
Matt Zoller Seitz
The movie genuflects toward pop depth in a scene where Grace sprawls on a motel bed watching Alfred Hitchcock’s "Birds," another thriller about implacable, undefined evil, but there’s a difference between refusing to give viewers the answers and having nothing to say. For all its death-metal vigor, The Hitcher falls into the latter camp.
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| 25 |
Boston Globe
If you boil off dialogue, performance, narrative logic and grind a movie down to the nub of genre, will there be any suspense left? The answer is yes, but only in a Pavlovian sense. You react to this dull shockathon like a wired lab rat who's seen it all before. And guess what? You have.
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| 25 |
San Francisco Chronicle
Any good will built up during the decent first half hour is quickly vaporized.
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| 20 |
The Hollywood Reporter
While the 1986 edition was no classic, it's light years better than this update, which naturally opened without being screened for those ultimate villains, the critics.
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| 20 |
Variety
In the absence of actors with the tremendous presence of Rutger Hauer and Jennifer Jason Leigh, picture loses its raison d'etre. Yet, directed by video helmer Dave Meyers with a certain fastidious distance from its plentiful gore, picture is also insufficiently over-the-top or corny to incite gleeful audience feedback.
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| 11 |
Austin Chronicle
The first film was near-mythic in its tone and treatment of its characters, while this remake barely serves as a primer in how not to generate suspense.
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