Friday the 13th (2009)

Let me be straight with you: I went into the 2009 Friday the 13th remake expecting to enjoy it in a guilty, brain-off kind of way, and came out the other side thinking it was actually pretty decent. Not great. Not scary. But decent, and in the context of this franchise, that's no small thing.

What this film does well is play it smart by not pretending to be anything other than a greatest-hits package. It pulls liberally from the early entries, weaving together elements and imagery from multiple films in the original run to build something that feels like a concentrated, polished version of Classic Jason. The woods around Crystal Lake look genuinely menacing in high definition. There's a texture to the darkness, a weight to the silence between kills, that the grainy originals could only achieve by accident. Here it feels considered, and it pays off.

Derek Mears deserves real credit. He plays Jason as a grounded, animalistic backwoods predator rather than the supernatural killing machine the later sequels turned him into, and it works enormously in the film's favour. There's cunning behind this Jason's eyes. He sets traps. He moves with purpose. He feels dangerous in a way that's rooted in something primal rather than something supernatural, and Mears carries that physicality with complete conviction. The hockey mask is in safe hands.

The opening sequence, following a group of teens into the woods as the film finds its feet, is tense and stylish in a way that genuinely surprised me. It sets a tone the middle years of the original franchise rarely managed. Compare it to some of the increasingly daft sequels and this remake looks like serious filmmaking by comparison. Which is both a compliment to what's been made here and a fairly damning indictment of where the series had ended up.

That said, I'm not going to pretend this is a film that asks much of you intellectually. The characters are essentially walking plot devices with names attached. The dialogue exists to fill the gaps between kills rather than to illuminate anybody's inner life. The story is a delivery mechanism, nothing more. If you come looking for depth or dread or anything that lingers past the end credits, you will be disappointed. This isn't the kind of horror that gets under your skin the way something like Moshari does. It's not interested in that conversation.

What it is interested in is getting you from one well-executed kill to the next with minimum fuss and maximum efficiency. The practical effects are strong, the CGI is used sparingly enough not to undermine them, and the pacing is lean. There's no fat on this thing. It moves. For a slasher reboot, that's genuinely half the battle won before you've even sat down.

I've seen people dismiss this one entirely, and I think that's too harsh. Yes, it's unambitious. Yes, it's exactly what you think it is going in. But there's something to be said for a film that knows precisely what it wants to be and executes that vision cleanly. This is a film that respects Jason's legacy without being a slavish imitation of any single entry. It's meaner and leaner than most of what came before it in the franchise, and it treats the audience as people who showed up to watch Jason Voorhees be terrifying in the woods, which is exactly what happens.

Three stars. Solid, satisfying, and not a minute longer than it needs to be. If you just want to watch Jason hack his way through a group of people making spectacularly bad decisions in the countryside, this does the job with more craft than it's usually given credit for.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2009  | Watched: 2025-10-02

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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