RAN­DALL SUMAIRS­INGH

Every­one has a break­ing point, a lim­it, an ex­treme, and Straw Dogs does an awe­some job at show­ing you just how crazy one can get, giv­en the cir­cum­stances. This is one film that I find par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult to crit­i­cise. It can be de­scribed by a va­ri­ety of con­tra­dic­to­ry ad­jec­tives, in­clud­ing lu­natic and in­ge­nious, bor­ing and ex­cit­ing. I use the word "in­ge­nious" a lit­tle loose­ly though. I'm not en­tire­ly cer­tain that movie did the pre­vi­ous film jus­tice, but the sto­ry­line was well de­liv­ered. I en­joyed the film, but yet, found my­self pre­dict­ing a lot of it. On the oth­er hand, I think that lead­ing view­ers to fore­tell the oc­cur­rences was all part of plot.

Plot

New­ly-weds David and Amy Sum­n­er (James Mars­den and Kate Bosworth) move back to Amy's deep-south child­hood home. David, a promi­nent writer and well-to-do man, is not used to the life-style and cul­ture of the south­ern­ers, and doesn't quite fit in. The towns­folk all ap­pear friend­ly and gen­uine, but there is a sin­is­ter feel­ing un­der­ly­ing them that (I think) David dis­cov­ers and ig­nores. His wife's ex-boyfriend and high school sweet­heart, Char­lie Ven­ner (Alexan­der Skars­gard), of­fers to help fix the roof of the work shed on the Sum­n­er's prop­er­ty. Hir­ing him as a ges­ture of good faith and trust, David tol­er­ates con­stant Char­lie's covert leer­ing and gest­ing.

Things get pro­gres­sive­ly worse un­til a heat­ed cli­max. Con­tin­ued provo­ca­tion over a long pe­ri­od of time leads up to a night where the Sum­n­er house is ac­tu­al­ly at­tacked. Pushed to his lim­it and hav­ing to de­fend him­self and his fam­i­ly, David Sum­n­er un­leash­es skills and ag­gres­sion that you would not have imag­ined he pos­sessed. It was amus­ing to me how David wiped that smile off of Char­lie's face.

Con­clu­sion

A lot of what I ex­pect­ed to hap­pen, didn't. In con­trast, a lot of what I didn't ex­pect to hap­pen, did. The rest was pre­dictable. There were a num­ber of loose ends left, as well as some un­ex­plained and pos­si­bly un­nec­es­sary char­ac­ters, but the over­all pro­duc­tion was good. It was a tru­ly psy­chot­ic thriller/dra­ma film that will en­ter­tain the right au­di­ence. Many times dur­ing the film, even if you were to­tal­ly ex­pect­ing a par­tic­u­lar some­thing to hap­pen, you may find your­self say­ing "I can't be­lieve that just hap­pened!"