The Crazies
Directed by Breck Eisner
Starring Timothy Olyphant, Radha Mitchell, Joe Anderson, Danielle Panabaker
**1/2

As much as I enjoy horror movies, there’s one thing about the genre that frustrates me: all too often, the films require their characters to act like total morons in order for the axe-wielding maniac/possessed toy/ghostly apparition/scaly demon spawn to pick them off one by one.

Of course, it’s worth pointing out that if the characters didn’t make stupid choices like splitting up when exploring strange houses in the dead of night or stopping to pick up that weird hitchhiker en route to their remote cabin in the woods, there wouldn’t be much of a movie.  Still, it’s always refreshing to see a horror film where the characters display a modicum of sense; for example, most of the folks in George A. Romero’s zombie pictures are fairly competent when it comes to keeping their brains out of the mouths of the walking dead.

I haven’t seen Romero’s 1973 shocker The Crazies, but I’d like to think that Breck Eisner, the director of the newly released remake, is paying homage to the original by anchoring his movie around a smart, capable hero.  That would be David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant), a small-town sheriff in Iowa whose close-knit community becomes a war zone when a government-engineered virus infects the citizens he serves and protects.  It’s a tradition in horror cinema to depict law enforcement types as buffoons, but Sheriff Dutton repeatedly demonstrates why he’s earned his badge, figuring out early on that the virus is being transmitted via the town’s water supply and encouraging his small band of fellow survivors–including his wife (Radha Mitchell) and deputy (Joe Anderson)–to stay in the open, out of small, confined spaces where they’ll inevitably become trapped.

If only the film were as savvy as its star; after a promising set-up though, The Crazies falls into a run-hide-fight narrative loop that’s not unlike a video game.  Virtually every sequence begins with Dutton and the rest of his entourage wandering into a new environment where they acquire helpful objects and information before doing battle with the infected townspeople, who have been transformed into mindless killing machines.  When not fighting their former friends and neighbors, the group also has to keep an eye out for the platoons of U.S. soldiers that are patrolling the streets, rounding up the virus’ victims and exterminating them when necessary.

Although Eisner doesn’t come from a horror background–he made his feature film debut in 2005 with the would-be blockbuster Sahara and has been relegated mostly to TV work since that movie flopped–he handles the material he’s been given effectively.  He lacks the sense of humor of a great genre filmmaker like Romero or Sam Raimi, but he does establish an evocative mood and tone and wrangles a few solid scares out of familiar situations.  Ultimately though, neither he nor the energetic cast–Olyphant and Joe Anderson are particularly good in roles that other actors might have chosen to sleepwalk through–can overcome the script’s deficiencies, which include the aforementioned repetitive story structure as well as a frustratingly inconsistent depiction of how the virus affects its victims.  Some go crazy right away, while others possess a remarkable ability to plan out their kills.  In one of the movie’s dumbest scenes, two of the infected capture Dutton’s wife and…tie her to a chair while they wait for her husband.  At least Romero’s zombies would have snacked on her intestines first.

The Crazies is playing in theaters now.