(2007, 84 min) Grace and Jim (Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton), two unusually dimwitted young lovers, are driving across the country for some completely irrelevant reason. Their casual pace and sunset canoodling are cut short with the arrival of John Ryder (Sean Bean), a tall, dark and handsome vagabond who psychologically tortures and murders travelers for amusement. Feeling guilty after nearly running him down with their car, Grace and Jim agree to give John a ride and narrowly escape with their lives. The surprisingly boring remainder of the film follows the couple as they attempt to track John down after he inadvertently frames them for the slaughter of an entire family.
The Hitcher is the newest insult to horror fans from money-hungry action producer Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes, the same production company responsible for remaking The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and The Amityville Horror (also in the works are updated versions of Friday the 13th and The Birds). Bay oversees half-assed commercial projects wherein the quality and content of the movie have much less importance than the fact that the title and plot are taken directly from a previously established and respected work. This time, music video director Dave Meyers was hired to update the original 1986 thriller and offers nothing stylistically that can't be found in the average car commercial.
Though marketed as a horror movie, The Hitcher is greatly lacking in shocks and scares. Instead, mediocre car-chase sequences occur too few and far between to redeem the film as a whole. Sophia Bush and Zachary Knighton are given at least 90% of the screen time and spend all of it struggling with atrociously unrealistic dialog like students in a freshmen acting class while Sean Bean weakly attempts to impersonate the raspy-voiced intensity that Rutger Hauer (the original Hitcher) built his entire career on.
© TLA Entertainment Group
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