A Very Spoilery Review of the Red Dawn Remake

I have a kinship towards the alumni of Dillon High School so I will support their movies no matter how crappy they are (*cough*The Roommate*cough*). So this past weekend I had a Tyra Collette double feature of G.I. Joe: Retaliation and Red Dawn. I did not have high hopes going into either of them but G.I. Joe was enjoyable, it had Trya, The Rock, Channing Tatum died early on and there was a really cool fight scene on the side of a mountain, so it was an enjoyable two hours for the most part. Sure the film suffered from Blockbuster fatigue where every summer movie for the last five years has to feature at least one city blow up.

Full Discourse Notice: I should not before going into deal about the updated version, I have never seen the 1984 original of Red Dawn and really all I know about the film is from what I learned from the I Love the 80’s segment which was basically telling a story about how much Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey hated each other on that set and how ironic they went on to star together in Dirty Dancing. So if you have not seen the Red Dawn reboot (or The Avengers or Terminator 2), stop reading now or you are about to be spoiled.

Red Dawn started out enjoyable enough, it had Trya, Tim Riggin’s father, Thor, and some cool fight scenes. Sure the plot was flimsy, the way the North Koreans were able to invade an American city with no U.S. military backlash was a little silly and I never figured out why some Americans were in detainment camps while others were able to come and go in the city as they pleased.

But the movie moved into guilty pleasure territory when Jeffery Dean Morgan showed up with his Navy Seal buddies showed up and added some much needed comic relief. They also set up the climactic battle which came to a satisfying finale when Thor killed the big bad Korean who killed his father at the end of the first act with his father’s gun. So all is well, the Wolverines make I back to the base with the piece of technology that will help rid America of the Koreans, Thor goes over to Tyra for a celebratory make out session… and gets shot in the face. What the frack!?!

Obviously the writers wanted to go for a shocking ending and killing off the main protagonist does the twist. But where the surprise twist at the end of, say, Memento, makes you instantly want to watch the movie again as soon as the credits roll, the shock ending only makes people irate. It is bad to kill off the main protagonist just minutes before the ending but you certainly do not kill him off in a surprise attack, at least give him an honorable death like, well, I was going to say Agent Coulson in The Avengers, but he may not have actually died. The only example that is coming off the top of my head was the time The Terminator melted himself down for the good of mankind at the end of T2.

The writers apparently did this so Thor’s douchebag little brother would have this grand transformation from selfish douchebag at the beginning of the film to the leader of the insurgency at the end. But you know what writers; I still did not care about the douchebag brother by the end. If you really needed the douchebag brother to have some grand transformation, how about just shooting Thor in the leg? Then the ending is douchebag brother giving his big speech, then walk off the stage where Thor is in a wheelchair and says to his douchebag brother, “Dad would be proud of you. I am proud of you.” End Movie.

But no, you have to go with the stupid ending. There is a reason no other film kills off the main protagonist a minute before the credits run, because the audience does not want to see it. Instead of the audience telling their friends, “You should go see Red Dawn because of the surprise ending,” they are going to tell them, “Avoid Red Dawn at all costs, it has one of the worst endings of all time.”

Red Dawn gets a on my Terror Alert Scale.