The Crazies
Directed by Breck Eisner
Runtime: 101 min.
Breck Eisner’s remake of George Romero’s The Crazies is one of those movies dishonest critics use for target practice. It has no big names or budget that they feel compelled to respect and so disrespect inspires them to ignore its visual wit and skillful pacing. True, director Eisner’s reboot of Romero’s 1973 original has absolutely no political resonance. But it’s better that way.
None of the facile social commentary that dull-witted critics like using to inflate Romero’s modern-day Grand Guignols gets in the way of Eisner’s cleanly laid-out government screw-up where tainted water causes citizens in a Midwestern town to go crazy and government quarantines them. Besides, the government often screws up and average Americans often go crazy (so said the blonde suit in Repo Man). Eisner simply choreographs the mad hokum. His talent and taste are constantly evident, especially when, in the midst of this horror reboot’s sideshow, Eisner pays tribute to Kurosawa’s Rashomon: Sheriff Timothy Olyphant discovers a dead body in an up-angled shot where rigor-mortised hands rise from the bottom of the frame as if clutching for life.
That image and knowledge of its original source should not surprise anyone who appreciated Eisner’s 2000 debut Sahara—one of the few successful adventure films that also worked as a credible (in fact, ingenious) historical allegory. Eisner knows how to make action vivid and in movies vivid should connote meaningful. (Bravo to cinematographer Maxime Alexandre’s bright imagery.) The clarity of The Crazies gets no deeper than zombie-movie dread but that’s the material. Eisner may know Kurosawa but his job is to please producer Romero. If The Crazies is a hit, maybe Eisner will get a chance at more substantive entertainment as Sahara promised.
Eisner makes The Crazies breezily obvious (with a clever car wash set-piece) whereas recent junk like Splinter and M. Night Shyamalan’s very similar The Happening took themselves too seriously. Here, the enigmatic government surveillance, the dehumanized townsfolk, the Sheriff’s alarm at the sudden turn of neighbors he thought he knew (including his loyal deputy well played by Joe Anderson), and the befuddlement of his endangered pregnant wife (Rhada Mitchell) are exactly the scares you expect. Eisner delivers—which makes him a more honorable Hollywood scion (son of former studio executive Michael Eisner) than Jason Reitman. The Crazies shows that Breck Eisner gets the movies and knows how to make them.
