Red Dawn Reviews
Top CriticIt's Friday Night Lights territory, but without good writing or acting.
Red Dawn suffers from a number of serious problems. The first, and most obvious, is that this is mini-series material compressed into a 95-minute movie.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Take that, screaming North Koreans with no agenda!
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| Original Score: C
John Milius's 1984 cult classic about American teens battling a Soviet invasion has been reinvented as a Tea Party wet dream that offers a scathing (if completely illogical) indictment of the federal government.
Hobbled by a laughably bad script and a uniformly uncharismatic cast.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Just really, really lame, right down to the Communist symbols that adorn the revised Stars and Stripes.
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| Original Score: 0.5/4
An even odder war story than the bluntly provocative, Reagan-era original.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The more ludicrous a concept, the more crucial it is that the director embrace the bigger-than-life absurdity. But everything about this project feels small-time.
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| Original Score: 1/5
Despite the more realistic battle scenes, nothing in it feels more fateful than a football game.
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| Original Score: 2/4
I think I'm beginning to understand why the Chinese were not reckoned to be a prime market for this film.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Could be fun, you might think. No. Bad acting and worse dialogue quickly put an end to that notion.
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| Original Score: 1.5/5
Bradley ... handles the low-fi action well, which helps divert attention from the bargain-bin special effects, bad acting and politics.
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| Original Score: 2.5/5
Was anybody out there clamoring for a remake of "Red Dawn"? Show of hands? Anybody?
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Scenes are rather murkily shot and characters are like cardboard cutouts.
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| Original Score: 2/4
[Its] portrayal of violence derives more from video games than from history.
Hutcherson gives what may be his first lackluster performance here, and I say that as someone who saw both Journey to the Center of the Earth movies.
Anew Red Dawn could have been so much more fun had it thrown a properly out-of-bounds tea party. (It lacks the signature brawn of original director John Milius, a guns-first libertarian.)
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| Original Score: 2/5
Unfortunately, the characters are so programmatic, the premise so ridiculous and the situations so far-fetched even if you accept that premise that no energy can be built, and the little that's there can't be sustained.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Today's terrorism paranoia, apparently, is too complex and too faceless for some. No, we need a clear-cut enemy. Do you have something in red?
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| Original Score: 1/4
"Red Dawn" is a ghoulish parody of reality, served up earnestly and obliviously, to an audience whose enjoyment will, perforce, be directly proportional to its ignorance.
Single-mindedly action-oriented to the point where Milius's film seems relatively ruminative ...
There's no edge to anything, either dramatically or politically.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Remaking an old film is rarely a good idea, but sometimes the idea is so spectacularly bad that the reasoning behind it defies all comprehension.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/4
... the new "Red Dawn" feels like -- a surface-level photocopy with all of the problems of the first film and none of the accidental, seen-in-the-rearview power.
Full Review
| Original Score: 1/5
An already silly premise is given a ham-fisted treatment in this ill-advised remake of John Milius' 1984 hit action film.
Battle scenes are infused with a propulsive sense of urgency, as Bradley (a vet stunt coordinator and second unit director) often achieves an effective semi-documentary look.
