If movies are to be believed, then small Southern towns are backwards nightmarish places and anyone with any common sense would flee them the first time they earn enough money for a bus ticket. The towns are always full to the brim with racists and technophobic football worshippers who all wield guns and are willing to shoot at anything that moves near their trucks. Someone in the South should really complain about this. Straw Dogs does nothing but help fuel this stereotype by adding huge levels of violence to the equation. I left the film with the same feeling that I’d have if Quentin Tarantino wrote Sweet Home Alabama.
The plot of Straw Dogs is really hard to follow since all of the character motivations are extremely difficult to understand. David Sumner (James Marsden, Superman Returns) and his hot actress wife Amy (Kate Bosworth, also in Superman Returns) move back to her tiny Southern hometown. It’s implied that it was Marsden’s idea and that Bosworth really doesn’t like being there, especially after her creepy ex-boyfriend Charlie (Alexander Skarsgard, True Blood) shows up. Marsden hires the creepy boyfriend to repair their ruined barn, even though his wife is uncomfortable with him, then Skarsgard and his buddies leer creepily at her. The plot degrades into this thing where Bosworth is trying to deal with the creepy ex while Marsden is adjusting to creepy small town life.
There’s a subplot about an older football coach, played by James Woods, not liking the town’s special needs person around his daughter, who may or may not be a convicted pedophile. The plotlines literally collide when Marsden and Bosworth have to protect the special guy from Skarsgard and his buddies while they lay siege to their house.
The plot is so flimsy because none of the characters’ motivations make any sense. Despite how uncomfortable Skarsgard makes Bosworth, even gruesomely raping her at one point, the married couple still doesn’t leave. Woods’s daughter is forbidden to talk to the disabled guy, who seems a lot like Boo Radley from To Kill A Mockingbird, but she is actually the one to lure him into a sexual encounter. Basically all the townsfolk are psychotic and the couple can’t communicate in any coherent manner. It makes the film a confusing mess of strange emotion and incoherent awkward dialogue.
The last half hour of the film seems to be the only thing that makes any sense. Essentially, the married couple’s house is under siege and Marsden systematically kills five men. The whole film turns from weird drama to intense action film, with increasingly clever ways to kill people. It’s interesting, but it’s still not clear why they are fighting in the first place. The whole film is just an incoherent mess and generally a waste of time.
Straw Dogs is rated R for extreme violence, an unnecessarily detailed rape scene and language.
