Editor's Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on January 19, 2007, and we're proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
“How did he find us?”
“Maybe he didn’t. Maybe it’s just bad luck.”
That exchange between terrorized college couple Grace (Sophia Bush) and Jim (Zachary Knighton) gets to the heart of one of the many problems with The Hitcher, which is just the latest of the many unnecessary horror remakes to emerge in the last few years, but feels like the most pointless upon actually viewing it. Here’s a “reimagining” in which absolutely no imagination has been put into updating the story or themes of its predecessor, or to justifying the retelling in the first place. It borrows all the major beats of the original, and gives nothing back in return.
The 1986 Hitcher, directed by Robert Harmon from an Eric Red script, was (hell, still is) a marvelously spare, eerie chronicle of a young man (also named Jim and played by C. Thomas Howell) being hounded by malevolent hitchhiker John Ryder (Rutger Hauer), who first threatens to kill him and then frames Jim for a string of subsequent murders as the latter tries to flee across the Southwestern desert. Despite having no hand in the new version, Red still receives primary screenplay credit on it, which isn’t surprising; the basic narrative, many key scenes and even significant lines of dialogue are duplicated wholesale. What’s puzzling is why it took two more writers (Jake Wade Wall, who also penned the When a Stranger Calls redux, and Eric Bernt) to effect changes that are largely cosmetic.
One key difference, of course, is that there are now two imperiled youths instead of one, which cuts down the fear factor right away. The idea of being alone and isolated in an unfamiliar landscape with someone threatening your life is simply a lot scarier than the notion of going through such an experience with a friend and potential protector by your side. (Yes, the ’86 Jim does receive some assistance from Jennifer Jason Leigh’s waitress character, but for a good deal of the running time, he goes it alone.)
In addition, what helped elevate the first Hitcher in the stalker pantheon was the twisted “relationship” that develops between Jim and Ryder, who is portrayed as a sort of devil who has fixated on Jim, intent on putting him through a trial by fire. Perhaps, that film suggests, he’s an angel of death who sees Jim as his successor—or his inevitable destroyer. These ambiguities are intriguingly teased out through Harmon’s dreamlike direction and Hauer’s coldly suggestive performance, particularly in a tense encounter between the two in a roadside restaurant. First-time feature helmer Dave Meyers and the rest of the new Hitcher team, however, have no time for such subtleties; their Ryder is a garden-variety cunning psycho, played by Sean Bean with plenty of surface menace but no discernable hidden layers. On evidence of the film, he simply makes Jim and Grace his recurring targets because they don’t give him a ride the first time they encounter him (or maybe it’s just that “bad luck”), and he doesn’t kill them the many times he has a chance because if he did, the movie would be over.
If it seems like I’m spending as much time here reviewing the first Hitcher as I am on the new one, it’s because the current film is such a (faded) carbon copy in so many ways (right down to a number of identical shots) that there’s little other context in which to discuss it. Absent the style and subtext of its inspiration, Hitcher 2007 is just another chase-and-kill thriller pared down to its barest essentials (at only 84 minutes, it’s nearly a quarter-hour shorter than the previous movie). And while the new explicitness dictates that the restaged centerpiece murder, done with horrifying suggestion by Harmon and co., is shown in all its gory glory this time, the secondary horrors here are disappointingly mundane. Instead of perverse little moments like the surprise Howell finds in his French fries, we get a generic collection of hand-on-shoulder jump-scares, a gotcha! nightmare scene and who’s-at-the-door? attempts at suspense. And as opposed to the eerie Mark Isham score of two decades ago, the action here is backed by a CD’s worth of youth-baiting pop and rock tunes (Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” again?).
OK, you ask, so what about those young viewers who haven’t seen or aren’t even aware of the original and will now experience this material for the first time? How will they take to this Hitcher? Well, all I can say is that at the preview I attended, that major death setpiece—whose ’86 incarnation elicited gasps followed by shocked silence when I saw it—was greeted by the ’07 crowd with cheers and applause. That pretty much tells you everything you need to know about both the new Hitcher and the audience at which it’s aimed.
