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The road to hell is paved with blood, guts and bad intentions

Knock, knock. Who's there? PHOTO COURTESY OF PANASIA

The Hitcher isn't shy about declaring its intentions. The opening image is of a jackrabbit crossing a desert highway and being pulped by a car. Soon after, the vacationing young hero, Jim (Zachary Knighton), asks his girlfriend, Grace (Sophia Bush), to hold the wheel of his 1970 Oldsmobile 442 so he can hang out of the driver's side window and clean a splattered bug off the windshield. Message: Roadkill comes in all shapes and sizes.

Like the same-titled 1986 cult movie, this remake fuses elements of The Terminator, the Twilight Zone episode with the phantom hitchhiker, and Steven Spielberg's desert chase Duel. Dave Meyers, directing his first feature, and his three screenwriters (including Eric Red, who wrote the original) have conceived the tale as a crash-and-burn action-horror film with intellectual pretensions.

As the mass-murdering, hero-framing title character, the British actor Sean Bean brings parched charisma, a nondescript "American'' accent and an overachiever's commitment to nuance. In the original, Rutger Hauer's lip-smacking baddie was Satan with a driver's license. Bean's version plays like the murderous hero of Crime and Punishment reimagined as a wraithlike stalker. He's a sadistic philosophical theorist, mucking with people who didn't get the memo saying God is dead.

Today's Words 今天單字 The Hitcher Directed by Dave Meyers Starring: Sean Bean (John Ryder), Sophia Bush (Grace Andrews), Zachary Knighton (Jim Halsey), Neal McDonough (Lieutenant Esteridge), Kyle Davis (Buford's store clerk), Skip O'Brien (Harlan Bremmer Sr.), Travis Schuldt (Harlan Bremmer Jr.), Danny Bolero (Officer Edwards). Running time: 90 minutes Taiwan Release: Today

His victims include a family whose bumper sticker identifies them as evangelicals. When Jim and Grace inspect the Hitcher's butchery, the scene ends with a close-up of a bloodied Sunday school booklet titled "Will I Go to Heaven?'' Later, asked "Why'd you do it?'' the Hitcher replies, "Why not?''

The remake preserves many of the original's notorious set pieces, including a showstopper in which the cab and trailer of an 18-wheeler are used as a torture rack. The mix of mystical solemnity and chain-reaction slapstick suggests a Road Runner cartoon directed by John Woo (吳宇森). This is the kind of film in which the heroes often have the evildoer dead to rights but fail to pull the trigger, ostensibly because they're prisoners of bourgeois morality, but really because if they did the smart thing, the film would be a short subject.

The movie genuflects toward pop depth in a scene where Grace sprawls on a motel bed watching Alfred Hitchcock's Birds, another thriller about implacable, undefined evil, but there's a difference between refusing to give viewers the answers and having nothing to say. For all its death-metal vigor, The Hitcher falls into the latter camp.
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