Well, I just had to do it. I had to see it for myself. All the other remakes, I could care less about. I don't have the love for Texas Chainsaw Massacre or Halloween that a lot of people have, so I don't hold them to be so sacred that they can't be remade. But dammit, the Hitcher, for me personally, that was MY movie! The dynamic between Jim and John is ESSENTIAL! It's basically John calling Jim out, in a perverse way, to be a man. Be the man that will kill another man. But the man that can save the woman. You lose that by making the main protagonist female. To say nothing of it missing the point of the original film, which went against the grain as far as the trends for slasher films in the early to mid 80s. The idea that the female, usually a teenager, has to find this inner stregth and fight back against a male oppressor. There's also the whole idea of slasher films as a sexual metaphor. It was refreshing to see The Hitcher take stuff like this out of the equation.
The problem with the remake begins with there being two people against Ryder in the first place. The initial with Ryder holding the knife to Jim loses a lot of tension with there being another person in the car. That person takes on all the concern and fear that should be taken on by the audience. There's no solitude with Jim as he has to deal with this psycho in his passenger seat. Then from the tiime they get him out of the car, it's a lot of bickering and "I told you so" banter to the point where certain scenes come off like they belong in a sitcom. There's also the face that Jim is NOTHING like Jim in the original. They've made him "cool guy", with his buff bod, soul patch, tattoos and muscle car. Not to mention A GIRLFRIEND!! Yeah, Nash is eventually introduced in the original, but for the most part, the film is Jim's journey, and Nash only gets pulled into things later on in the film, and it makes her death that much more powerful. The fact that Jim got her involved and he barely knew her. There's this trust that has to build quickly because of the urgency of the situation. But with Jim and Grace being there from the beginning, they both end up getting shortchanged. Having to focuse on two character arcs playing out simultaneously, they get cancelled out. For a while, it feels like the film should be Jim's journey as there's a plot point of him being nervous about meeting Grace's friends and having to deal with that until Ryder is introduced. But then it turns out to be Grace's journey, but for no justifiable reason.
Beyond that, the film just takes every moment of subtlety from the original, and decides they have to follow through and show us EVERYTHING. Jim and Grace finding the family in the station wagon, and of course, the Rig scene outside the motel. Nothing was more horrifying then imagining what happened to Nash when Ryder let the rig roll. Seeing it happen in the remake was just ridiculous. The filmmakers don't leave anything to the imagination. And it seems like they go out of their way to add as much blood to the film as possible. It's really quite a mess of a film.
