One always takes a chance when viewing a remake of a film that they enjoy. However, this is not so much of a worry for fans of the original Wicker Man, as this new version, starring Nicholas Cage, is so far removed from the original that it is less of a remake and more of a re-imagining of the story.
Unfortunately, they imagined out all the good parts.
Gone is the thought provoking nature of the film, the tension, the sense of mystery, the fantastic soundtrack (in fact I missed it so much in this version that I'm downloading it from the iTunes store even as I write this), Christopher Lee's insidious whimsy and, somewhat surprisingly, the emphasis on titilation and sexuality that was so prominent in the original. In its place is a misogynistic mess of a movie; which, although visually stunning, is poorly plotted, strangely edited, replete with eminently quotable B-movie grade dialog, and insistent on pushing the metaphor of "society as beehive" beyond its reasonable limits.
The breakdown, for those of you not in the know, is that Nicholas Cage's character, Edward Malus, is an officer of the law who hastens himself to a small island in response to a letter regarding a missing child. Once there, he encounters a culture both cut-off from the modern world and built around ancient religious traditions. He then struggles not only with solving what looks increasing like a murder mystery, but also with the reality that this culture exists concurrently with his own.
More after the jump...
For this to be a successful struggle, Malus - representative not only of duty and order, but indeed of what is normal and known to the audience as they journey with him in this strange land - needs to be a character the audience respects and possibly identifies with. Wicker Man fails phenomenally here, Malus is a staggeringly unreliable hero: before he arrives on the island he is already heavily medicated and suffering from stress induced delusions (a conceit used specifically to insert some "scary" moments into this so-called horror film - because there's no other reason for it) - and almost everything he does from the moment he steps on the island, waving his badge around and shouting about the "law," is of dubious legal merit. In fact, since the island is private, the very act of setting foot on it to begin with is a legal infraction. If they had drawn a thin blue line in the sand, he would have trodden all over it. There is no way for the audience to respect him. (The audience I saw this with did laugh at him though. Often. And in places that should not have been funny.)
I had read somewhere that the decision to make the leadership of the island female was to give the film a feminist angle. I would argue that the way it was handled, it does, in fact, do the opposite (they might as well have called the picture "Edward Malus and Island of Smug Misandrists with Exquisite Penmanship.") What might make it worth some feminist theory dissertations is not the behavior of the islander, but rather of Cage's character, who forces his way into a community where his authority is not recognized, and yet insists of blustering around, giving orders, both legal and social. When both his badge and his manhood fail him, he relies on the phallic symbol preferred by most action movie heroes - his gun.
But this is not a dissertation (despite the length), but rather a film review - so here's the review bit: From my fellow movie goers at the UA Riverview (where you know audiences are unafraid to speak their opinion, even during the show): "That was Nicholas Cage's worst movie yet," "Yo, this wasn't supposed to be funny. It's supposed to be a horror movie," "This movie is terrible," and, our favorite, - the editorial snoring of the gent behind us who nodded off about 20 minutes in and slept most of the way through. If only we'd have had his foresight.
In the film, Dr. Moss (played by Six Feet Under's Frances Conroy) minsters to an injury of Malus', telling him that she has "dealt with the danger in the Old Way," a very sage move. If nothing else, this Wicker Man does prove that sometimes the old ways are the best ways - at least where movies are concerned. I suggest dealing with this cinematic danger by bypassing the theatre and picking up the original from your favored purveyor of video or DVD.
I'm giving it both an L & O on our LOVE scale - but frankly the second half of the O is only because I'll be quoting this one loudly and inappropriately for a while, and that's worth half-an-O at least.
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