Friday the 13th (R-Rated Widescreen) (2009)

ReelViews 5 of 10
Sometimes I wonder if there's a point to reviewing something like this. Then again, if I shared my thoughts about Sex and the City, why not Friday the 13th? Let's get this out of the way at the start: If all you're looking for is breasts, blood, and gore, this film hits pay dirt. None of the killings are terribly inventive, but they are plentiful, and why bother being devious when axes, machetes, knives, and pointed sticks will do the job just as well?...Friday the 13th opens with a bang - a high-energy prologue that sets up the pieces and knocks them down before announcing the film's title. Had the rest of the movie followed suit, I'd be recommending it to more than tits-and-gore lovers. Alas, the main story is a mess, with all the cliches firmly in place...The thing that's the most frustrating about this new Friday the 13th is how little creativity went into this re-imagination. The original may be a landmark on the cinematic landscape in terms of its importance to the genre, but it was not a great motion picture. There was an opportunity here to take the basic idea and do something special with it. For about 15 minutes, it appeared that was happening. After that... we get something that's more soulless, more pointless, and less enjoyable than anything in the original. Remake, reboot, re-envisioning - whatever you call it, it amounts to the same thing: a cynical money grab. This movie exists for the same reason that Rob Zombie's Halloween travesty was made - because the studios behind the projects won't give up until every last cent is bled out of the titles and they survive only as punch lines to bad jokes. This is the twelfth movie featuring Jason Voorhees, Camp Crystal Lake, and/or some combination of the two. Do we really want a thirteenth? If you can answer "yes" to that question, especially with this one unseen, then you deserve what director Marcus Nispel and co-producers Sean S. Cunningham and Michael Bay have provided. - James Berardinelli
 
Chicago Sun-Times 6 of 10
"Friday the 13th" is about the best "Friday the 13th" movie you could hope for. Its technical credits are excellent. It has a lot of scary and gruesome killings. Not a whole lot of acting is required. If that's what you want to find out, you can stop reading...Since the original movie came out in 1980, there were 10 more films -- sequels, retreads, fresh starts, variations, whatever. Now we get the 2009 "Friday the 13th," which is billed as a "remake" of the original...It will come as little surprise that Jason still lives in the woods around Crystal Lake and is still sore about the decapitation of his mom. Jason must be sore in general...So far in the series, he has been drowned, sliced by a machete in the shoulder, hit with an ax in the head, supposedly cremated, aped by a copycat killer, buried, resurrected with a lightning bolt, chained to a boulder and thrown in the lake again, resurrected by telekinesis, drowned again, resurrected by an underwater electrical surge, melted by toxic waste, killed by the FBI, resurrected through the possession of another body, returned to his own body, thrown into hell, used for research, frozen cryogenically, thawed, blown into space, freed to continue his murder spree on Earth 2, returned to the present, faced off against Freddy Krueger of "Nightmare on Elm Street," drowned again with him, and made to emerge from Crystal Lake with Freddy's head, which winks...I know what you're thinking. No, I haven't seen them all. Wikipedia saw them so I didn't have to. The question arises: Why does Jason continue his miserable existence, when his memoirs would command a seven-figure advance, easy? There is another question. In the 1980 movie, 20 years had already passed since Jason first went to sleep with the fishes. Assuming he was a camper aged 12, he would have been 32 in 1980, and in 2009, he is 61. That helps explain why one of my fellow critics at the screening was wearing an AARP T-shirt. - Roger Ebert