The Crazies (2010)

There's a moment watching The Crazies when you think: right, this is actually pretty decent. It moves well, it's got genuine menace, and it taps into something properly unsettling about ordinary people turning feral and the institutions meant to protect you becoming the threat. And then another cheap jumpscare lands, and you come back down to earth a little.

Let me be clear about something upfront: this is the 2010 remake, not George Romero's original 1973 film. And the reason I think it's worth making that distinction is because Romero's fingerprints are still faintly visible here, which is actually one of the more interesting things about it. He's long since proved he's not a one-trick pony when it comes to horror. Zombies made him famous, sure, but the man understands how to use infection, paranoia and societal collapse as a lens for something bigger. The remake borrows that instinct, even if it doesn't quite follow through on it.

And that's my central gripe. The original Crazies did something genuinely bold: it split its attention between the civilians trying to survive and the military trying to contain the outbreak, and that dual perspective gave the whole thing a moral complexity that really got under your skin. You could see both sides unravelling simultaneously. This version strips that away almost entirely. We're locked in with the civilian survivors throughout, which is fine as a dramatic choice, but it costs the film something. The military here are just a faceless, menacing force rather than a parallel group of frightened people doing terrible things for reasons they think are justified. That's a much less interesting horror, when all's said and done.

The jumpscare problem compounds it on repeat viewings. First time through, some of them land. The tension is built competently enough that when something does go bang, you've been wound up correctly. But so many of them are purely mechanical, designed for the jolt rather than for any lasting dread. Once you know they're coming, the architecture holding the film together feels a bit flimsy. Horror that relies on surprise rather than atmosphere tends to lose its grip fast, and The Crazies is a pretty clear illustration of that principle.

What holds it together, and what keeps it just above average rather than sliding below it, is the pacing and a solid central performance that keeps you invested even when the script isn't doing the characters many favours. The rural American setting works well too, wide open spaces that should feel safe and don't, and there are a couple of sequences with real craft behind them. A car wash scene sticks in the memory. That kind of sustained, claustrophobic dread is what the whole film could have been, and occasionally is.

So where does that leave us? It's a perfectly watchable horror film on a Friday night, and I'd recommend it with that framing. Go in expecting a slightly above average genre romp and you'll have a decent enough time. Go in expecting the paranoid, politically charged bite of Romero's best work and you'll feel the gaps. I don't think it's a bad film, I just think it's a missed opportunity dressed up as a solid one.

Three stars.

Rating: ★★★ (3/5)

Originally logged on Letterboxd.