Dir. Breck Eisner, USA/United Arab Emirates, 2010, 101 mins
Cast: Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker
Review by Kevin Gill
Like Zack Snyder's 2004 version of Dawn of the Dead, The Crazies might best be described as an upgrade, rather than a remake, of a George A. Romero movie. With its slick direction, seamless editing and accomplished sound design, this is without question a superficially superior take on Romero's typically lo-fi Vietnam-era original (made in 1973), in which a rural American town is quarantined by the military after the outbreak of a virus that sends the infected round the twist.
It is equally indisputable that in the process of applying spit and polish to Romero's grime, many of the original film's most interesting and subversive ideas have been systematically stripped away. Most notably, screenwriters Scott Kosar and Ray Wright opt to remove any sustained focus on both the military operation to contain the disease within the town's parameters and the uprising it provokes from outraged townsfolk. Romero seized the opportunity to probe the machinations of military power by developing a prominent character in operation chief Colonel Peckem, whose trigger-happy soldiers loot, raid, intimidate, and treat resistant citizens, sick or not, as hostile enemies.
Power has no equivalent face in Breck Eisner's newly sanitized version, with orders coming via a computer screen showing satellite imagery of the infected town and the military's role in the outbreak only becoming clear in the final act. The troopers – dressed in standard issue quarantine attire of white polythene overalls and gas masks – act with similar ruthlessness in terminating the sick and keeping the town isolated, but it is the infected themselves who are presented as the biggest threat to their still-healthy friends and neighbours. Unlike their predecessors, whose loopy behaviour manifests itself in a number of ways (Romero's film includes queasy moments in which a father and daughter commit incest and a priest sets himself on fire in the street, while the mischievous soundtrack features cuckoo clocks and breaking guitar strings), these new crazies – following a short period of vacant staring and incoherent babbling – are exclusively homicidal. They also change physically, quickly resembling the zombies in Snyder's movie with protruding veins, oozing eyes and pustule-ridden skin: a tweak that serves to both up the gore quota and make the rules of engagement unambiguous.
The diversions from Romero's original result in a straight-up genre movie that delivers familiar thrills within a sturdy moral framework. Fittingly, the film's two main characters are bastions of small town civic duty: a friendly, conscientious sheriff, David (played by Timothy Olyphant), and his equally conscientious pregnant wife Judy, a doctor (Radha Mitchell). (It is interesting to note that the equivalent main characters in the original movie were a rugged fireman and his pregnant girlfriend, a nurse). As the couple attempt to reunite when anarchy ensues and then flee the town with respective deputy and assistant in tow, Eisner pulls off a series of carefully calibrated, tense set pieces that are likely to achieve their modest aim of setting viewers' pulses racing before a last gasp escape or a minor character's gory end. There's a pleasingly pulpy feel to some sequences, such as a frenzied battle in the morgue involving an out-of-control surgical saw, a surprise attack by an avenging wife and her son in the couple's not-yet-occupied nursery and a claustrophobic struggle with a horde of unseen attackers in a car wash – but that's not enough to steer The Crazies away from its determinedly conservative path.
Indeed, the film's ending says much about its limited ambition: though nominally just as tragic as the original's, it retains none of its gut-wrenching bleakness. Eisner's next two projects are reportedly updates of Mike Hodges' Flash Gordon and David Cronenberg's The Brood – only time will tell if he proves himself the studios' go-to man for efficient, entertaining but ultimately bland revamps of cult movies.
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