The Hitcher

The Hitcher (2007)

Directed by: Dave Meyers
Written by: Eric Red, Eric Bernt, Jake "Eric" Wade Wall, based on the 1986 flick written by Eric Red
Starring: Sean Bean, Sophia Bush, Zachary Knighton, Neal McDonough

I guess I haven't written too much lately - between sleeping on my neighbours' lawn (don't ask) and working on my masterpiece, I haven't had the oodles of time and energy I usually do (yep, sleeping and sitting on my ass really take a lot out of me).

Anyway, I was under the impression that this movie was going to teach me how to date. No, I kid. I knew perfectly well what this was about. As you'll recall, I was hopping to see it a few months ago...

"[I]t looks stupid but I can't help it, I love Sean Bean. He's so cool. Yeah, he's in a lot of shitty movies, and he sucks in a lot of them, but he's still so cool. Maybe I'll watch the original and then make up my mind. I'll probably ... whine when none of my friends will go see it with me. That's what I usually do."

That's what I said then. And I was right on some levels. It was really stupid, and I did whine when no one would come see it with me. I didn't watch the original, though. I was like, hey, it's got Sean Bean (he's my favourite),what could go wrong?

Anyway, enough of that. The plot involves a couple of stupid, fornicating (!) college students who decide to go on a road trip. While driving through New Mexico, they run into a murderous psychopathic hitchhiker who sets them up for a bunch of murders, and tries to kill them. Why? Because... he must? I don't know.

So basically, it's like Duel meets The Terminator (with a little bit of Psycho thrown in there, God knows why).

Moving on, there are one or two "Oh Yeah!" moments. You know, cars getting exploded, flipped over, that kind of thing. Buddy getting ripped in half (sweet). That was in the first one, though, wasn't it? So what's the point? Some remakes change the modes of death a little bit (The Omen for example - yeah, buddy gets decapitated by a falling sign or something instead of a huge pane of glass (I liked the pane of glass better, actually)).

Anyway, it had that sort of gritty, grainy feel to it (which you see in just about every horror movie set in Texas/New Mexico/wherever (IOW, all of them)), but I've seen that so much it ceases to be interesting. It was like the music. Good, but it's the same music that's in all these frigging movies so I don't care.

And I'm sorry, but the Hitcher is just kind of lame. He has no motives, no reason to do anything except that he feels like it. The movie has no point.

And why couldn't Sean Bean be English? I'd like to say that his accent wasn't very good, but he didn't talk for long enough at any one time to really tell. It was just kind of startling. I like his Northern accent. He could have been British... I guess. Why the hell not?

I don't know. The ending was kind of anti-climactic. And it wasn't scary. At all. It wasn't anything a whole lot. It wasn't suspenseful (you know what's going to happen), scary, gory, anything. It was fluff.

And that CG rabbit at the beginning really bothered me. It was fucking CG. Stupid rabbit thing. And it was poorly written. And it was poorly acted. And... eh.

I was in a really hyper, gleeful mood, too. I couldn't stop laughing. It's a pretty funny movie, actually, if you look at it that way. I was thinking about Hitch through the whole thing, which accounts for some of it.

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