Reboots and remakes seem to be the order of the decade right now since so many movies are getting this treatment. Fear, the movie that starred Reese Witherspoon and Mark Wahlberg, is just the next in line to receive this dubious honor. The reason it’s dubious is simple, Hollywood seems to be running out of ideas or their gathered group of writers are simply getting too lazy to come up with anything that might be worthwhile or give a chance to those thousands of writers that are contributing to the writing pool but are considered to be hacks or ‘not worthy’ for some reason. That seems to be the attitude that comes across anymore when it comes to Hollywood. It’s better to churn out old ideas in supposedly new ways than it is to really dig down and find whatever hidden gems there might be in the literary world.
This movie wasn’t that great but it wasn’t that bad either as it featured what a lot of parents would worry about when it comes to someone dating their daughter. Apparently the new version is going to be from a female’s perspective, which is confusing since there aren’t a lot more details than that at the moment. Does this mean that the stalker/girlfriend is going to be the problem child that, like Wahlberg, has some serious dark side issues? Or is it going to be that the female protagonist is going to take up the majority of the story? Because quite honestly Mark Wahlberg’s character did take up a good portion of the story since it was his mania that everyone got to witness firsthand. Witherspoon’s character was almost secondary at times as Wahlberg and his madness were front and center for the show.
It is in some ways a love story, but one that goes off the rails to such a degree that you can’t help wondering why any young woman wouldn’t be able to see the signs of obsession and possibly something worse. The problem of course is inexperience and the fear of what the other person will do. Without knowing that darker side of the individual there’s really no way to know what they’re capable of until they finally snap. If they did happen to make the girlfriend the psychotic one then it might be a nice twist to the original movie and something worth watching because it would be just different enough so that people could feel comfortable knowing that they might not be able to predict what was about to happen.
Maybe that’s the problem with reboots. No matter how different the cast is, or how much the plot and the story is changed up, there’s always that hint that nothing is going to change so much that you can’t guess what’s about to happen at any given moment. There are bound to be some surprises of course, but usually with a remake or a reboot it’s the same story in a different package.
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