What do you do if you're responsible for one of the most critically reviled, audience-ignored studio flops of the decade? Well first you keep a low profile for about five years, i.e don't direct any more terrible movies. Then, once people have mostly forgotten about the debacle of your last $130 million mistake, you come back and make a small, focused movie that only costs about as much as your last movie likely lost at the box office. For silver-spoon director Breck Eisner (ex-Disney honcho Michael Eisner is his daddy) this strategy seems to have gotten him out of Hollywood purgatory. But with his IMDB page listing a bunch more big budget remakes on his horizon, only time will tell if Eisner has truly learned from his mistakes (he has the foolish balls to remake John Carpenter's Escape From New York, so probably not).
The mistake in question was Sahara starring Matthew McConaughey and Penelope Cruz, but to place all of the blame on Breck Eisner is of course not fair. Paramount was looking to set up a money-machine franchise with McCon based on the 13,000 novels by trashy writer Clive Cussler, featuring his main hero Dirk Pitt. Yes, Eisner was the captain of the sinking ship, but it was Paramount who bankrolled the ill-fated voyage and Paramount who ignored the signs of stormy weather to come. I mean, their iconic hero-to-be was named Dirk Pitt and yet that somehow didn't throw up any red flags. I was one of the few people in North America to see Sahara in the theatre and it was truly awful. Naturally I loved it. When it finished I remember thinking, "wow, this Eisner kid is not going places". Well as it turns out, I should never have bet against the son of an insanely rich Hollywood player. Eisner has returned with The Crazies, his low-ish budget remake of the George Romero ultra-low budget original and it's pretty good for what it is. But mostly I think it stands as a prime example of how studios should proceed in our lean economy as well as how a remake/reboot/re-imagining should be handled if Hollywood remains intent on this creatively bankrupt course of action.
Ogden Marsh is a sleepy farming community with a small population of 1,200 nestled amongst corn fields and long expanses of flat horizon. This is America's heartland, typified in the opening scene by a little league game played on the edges of farmland. The wholesome comfort of this image is turned on its head when a man with a shotgun stalks across the field with murder in his eyes. The towns good-natured Sherrif, David Dutton is forced to shoot and kill the man. Naturally this sudden violent moment reverberates through the town and internally for the sheriff. He doesn't have long to dwell on it though, as another gruesome event shakes the close-knit foundations of the community. A husband traps his wife and son in a closet and then sets fire to the house. When the police arrive, he's casually mowing the lawn. He too is dead-eyed and unresponsive, just like the poor farmer Dutton killed on opening day of baseball season.
Dutton and his loyal deputy, Clank are then led into the marshes of the towns name and find a dead military pilot and his downed plane in the water that feeds into the towns drinking supply. Just as the possibility of a viral outbreak crosses Dutton's mind, all hell breaks loose. The military invades Ogden Marsh and begin setting up quarantines, separating husbands from wives and children from parents. Dutton is herded by gas-masked soldiers like all the rest of the citizens, his Sherriff's badge a trinket in the face of terrifying martial law. His pregnant wife Judy, the towns doctor, is ripped from his arms when she is suspected of showing symptoms of the virus. He is forcibly subdued and when he wakes up, he is riding in a cattle-car to an extraction point with other terrified citizens. Dutton has seemingly been delivered to safety along with hundreds of other town residents who don't show any signs of the virus, one that turns it's hosts into murderous "crazies".
From here The Crazies reverses the order of the apocalypse movie, with Dutton breaking back in to the condemned town in order to find his wife, whose symptoms are related to her pregnancy and not the spreading crazyitis. Nothing overly surprising or innovative follows, but The Crazies nevertheless follows a straight and solid path, satisfying most when putting its characters through the wringer of survivalist dread. David and Judy Dutton go through hell, and the actors who play them, Timothy Olyphant and Rhada Mitchell, gamely rise to the challenge of being abused. Timothy Olyphant is always a strong, reliable presence in B entertainment, ably playing both straight-backed heroes and unhinged weirdos. He's one of my favourite character actors working today and I'm always happy to see him get top billing.
In terms of genre entertainment these days, frankly not-fucking-it-up-badly constitutes a win and The Crazies, with its limited budget and smaller scope manages to satisfying more than it irks. The rules of the virus aren't effectively defined and I was disappointed that Eisner opted for creature makeup for his "crazies" as opposed to relying on straight performance, but by the time the Duttons are outrunning a nuclear blast in the cab of a stolen transport truck, you won't really care. The Crazies is just fine. It'll do. What I'm responding to more is the implications of its model, or the example it sets, however slight. Eisner trades the 100 + million budget that sunk him on Sahara for more control and less studio involvement (although this was likely not by choice). He gives up the A-list actor meddling and ego for solid performers with proven track records. Yes, this is a remake, which normally I hate as a general rule. But in the case of The Crazies, it's one of the few remakes that kinda makes sense, seeing as very few people have seen or even heard of Romero's original. It doesn't leave the same bad taste in your mouth like the films that trample over beloved territory or simply update a two year old Swedish film minus the subtitles (I'm looking at you Let Me In or whatever the fuck you're called). It's not much to get excited about, I know, but if the decent box office for The Crazies signals a back-to-basics genre resurgence, I could certainly get behind that.
