My reviews of late have followed 2 patterns; they have been late, and they have been short.
Sadly, this is not the review to buck those trends.
For the lateness, I can only apologise; for the brevity, I feel I have an excuse.
This movie is a remake of week 99's "Who Can Kill a Child?", and in a perfect allegory for the film itself, a full length review would be much like that one, with all the same problems as its predecessor, and any changes would probably result in losing many of the best bits.
So yeah, this is mostly the exact same film; didn't do a side-by-side comparison, but I think bits of it could even be shot-for-shot, and the bits that they changed either didn't need changing, or were changed for the worse.
The original earned a recommendation from both of us; but it wasn't a perfect film. A remake of a good, but not perfect, film is a great opportunity; If they'd fixed the pacing and made the characters a little bit smarter, this could have been a great film, and surpassed the original.
Sadly, the pacing and stupidity remains, and the moralising about children suffering at the hands of adults is gone, taking with it a lot of the point of the movie. Creepiness has also been replace with gore; not that this is a splatter movie, by any stretch, but one or two moments have been ramped up, and lost thier atmosphere in the process.
All in all, not a terrible film, but far from a good one, and it's been done better. Stick to the original.
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