Carrie

Don’t make Carrie angry. You wouldn’t like Carrie when she gets angry. Well, you might like her a little bit.

In this remake, (if you didn’t know it was a remake, you are the target audience, if you are old enough to know the words to Bon Jovi’s You Give Love A Bad Name, just rent the original, again) Chloe Grace Moretz stars as Carrie – a formerly home schooled high school girl all of the other students find to be super weird (because she is). She’s a wallflower who is afraid of her own shadow, and her mother (Julianne Moore) is a religious zealot who thinks the kid might be some sort of unholy being in need of massive Godly influence and forces her to live a sheltered existence.

While in the ladies shower after gym class, Carrie “takes her first step into womanhood,” which leads to horrible bullying by the other kids, and the sadistic Chris (Portia Doubleday) isn’t finished. She has something planned for prom night, but Carrie has started to realize she has secret powers that might help her even the score.

Carrie is a run-of-the-mill, average movie. For someone like me, who already knows how it is going to end and all of the big twists and turns, there isn’t much here to get excited about.

Sure, Moretz is good as the lost little girl who finds her strength and backbone. It’s a role that easily can be overdone to the point of silliness, but Moretz and director Kimberly Peirce rein it in to be creepy in the right ways, and, most importantly, to make Carrie a sympathetic figure. It you were treated like this day after day after day, you might want to use your powers to kick some booty, too, so the audience is left cheering at some of Carrie’s attempts to stand up for herself.

Yet, Peirce doesn’t do anything with Carrie that justifies a remake. We don’t get some new amazing visual flair. We don’t get some shocking new storylines. We don’t see anything we haven’t already seen before.

It’s a very linear story with no deeper complexity, beyond one of the girls who starts to regret her past behavior. We could have used more background about Carrie’s life in school, more incidents from the past to show how she got to this horrible place, and more insight into Carrie’s life at home. These are the additions that could have made it fresh and new.

Carrie is rated R for bloody violence, disturbing images, language and some sexual content.