Red Dawn

Bradley is strongest in action, so for having little money, he offers a lot of functional old-fashioned escapism that doesn't need unnecessary pixels to work. Unfortunately, mentally the film was thirty years behind the times, so I was just as angry as I was watching the original. I'm not willing to put up with the teenage guerrilla war, despite what I said above. Bradley doesn't update the original except to replace the Soviets with North Koreans, and all he would have needed to do was to tighten up on the exaggeration or drag the kids through a proper marathon of blood and filth. Instead, they’re standing painlessly somewhere in the middle and beating their chest proudly while flags with stars and stripes fly in the background. For all the technical positives, this gets insanely boring at the end. I don't believe it sat in the vault for those three years just to squeeze more money out of the Hemsworth name. Clearly, more of the people involved had no idea how to handle this $70 million fail. 2 and a ½. (20.02.2013)

Eins zwei, Kim Jong-Un kommt gleich vorbei - und holt Sie. Ich hoffe, dass Fadejews Erben irgendwelche Tantiemen für die bereits zweite Exploatation der Jungen Gardenige Lizenzgebühren für den zweiten Raub der "Jungen Garde" erhalten, die ebenso geistig ausgereift ist wie die erste ... Die allerdings noch durch Breschnew zu entschuldigen war, wo es noch stank, jedoch eine heldenhafte nordkoreanische Armee, die selbst durch ein Stück Schweinefleisch außer Gefecht gesetzt wird, ist lediglich eine läppische Vertuschung von Drehbuchdemenz und regietchnischer Unfähigkeit. Eine ekelhafte Darbietung einer keineswegs lustiger Agitation. Ich will mehr Burger, mehr Kriege, mehr Kommis, mehr Spaß. (08.04.2013)

"Red Dawn" tells us about how a group of children can fight, but it is unbelievable as a fact that the Japanese would win the war if they recruited sumo wrestlers into the army. The performances here are not very important, maybe only Josh Hutcherson plays a little bit, but it's not to the benefit of the film. He still doesn't seem to me like someone who should play a masculine hero, but rather, I still see him as that boy. The film doesn't have much to offer in terms of story, it's mainly about action, which somehow works. However, when the story is so simple, almost stupid, it only confirms that remakes don't make sense, especially not remakes of films that are half-forgotten. "Red Dawn" is ultimately a fairly sterile spectacle that is not gritty enough to impress, it's not critical enough to provoke reflection, and it's not funny enough to be taken with a grain of salt. It's just a typical contemporary American production. (19.11.2013)