[Online] Review: “Freddy vs. Jason”
By Daily Bruin Staff
Aug. 17, 2003 9:00 p.m.
“Freddy vs. Jason” Directed by Ronnie Yu New
Line Cinema
Devotees of the long-running “Friday the 13th” and
“Nightmare on Elm Street” slasher series now have, at
long last, the chance to see two of the scariest film icons ever
conceived try to beat each other into bloody messes in Ronnie
Yu’s surprisingly entertaining “Freddy vs.
Jason.”
The Hong Kong director, who previously helmed an installment of
another horror franchise, 1998’s “Bride of
Chucky,” has a much better feel for complex action sequences
than for scenes that generate actual fear, but in the case of
“Freddy vs. Jason,” the tendency is well served. The
title characters are by now so recognizable, and the plot of how
they meet so preposterous, the horror element of the film is lost
almost from the first moment.
Yu then makes the intelligent decision to concentrate on fight
scenes and to use the inherent campiness of the story to his
advantage: Scene after scene finds the human characters drenched in
rivers of blood so large in volume as to be laughable. Terrible
expositional dialogue between Elm Street lovebirds Lori (Monica
Keena) and Will (Jason Ritter) translates easily into comedy gold.
And Freddy and Jason themselves, packing plenty of murderous rage
and corny one-liners (at least on Freddy’s part), often play
more like a slapstick duo with Thursday night gigs in the Catskills
than the two reigning lords of the underworld.
It adds up to a mostly enjoyable, gross-out action movie with
enough winks and nods to the film’s many predecessors to keep
diehard fans happy (although any doubts as to whether Jason will
survive this battle with Freddy ought to have been neatly answered
by 2001’s “Jason X,” in which the hockey-masked
marauder awakens in a space ship 400 years from now).
If “Freddy vs. Jason” itself becomes franchise,
however, it would be great to see the filmmakers find a way to show
Freddy as being evil without resorting to cheap racism and
homophobia. In one fight scene with Kia, played adequately by
Destiny’s Child singer Kelly Rowland, Freddy excitedly refers
to her as “dark meat,” to which Kia retorts,
“What kind of faggot runs around in a Christmas
sweater?” Surely Freddy has enough deadly tricks up his
sleeve to come up with better barbs, and his victims ought to be
able to defeat him without becoming posterchildren for
intolerance.
-Sommer Mathis
