Nelson McCormick's The Stepfather

[Hal2001]

The Stepfather (2009)

Here we have yet another remake in the long-standing tradition of Hollywood's unoriginality. I've never seen the original "Stepfather," but I imagine it can't be any worse than this. All this film turns out to be is a long list of clichés that continually pile up, while the audience, bored as can be, waits for the conclusion to come about.

David Harris (Dylan Walsh) is a seemingly normal guy, except that he's a serial killer. One day at the supermarket, he meets Susan (Sela Ward), who takes to him rather quickly after he feeds her a concocted story about losing his family in an accident. Six months later, he is living with her and her three kids, Beth (Skyler Samuels), Sean (Braeden Lemasters), and Michael (Penn Badgley), who has recently returned home from military school. Several strange things begin to happen starting with a neighbor thinking that David looks an awful lot like a sketch from "America's Most Wanted." After these strange things begin to pile up, Michael becomes determined to find out what is going on.

From the very first scene, this film makes a fatal flaw. We know immediately that David is a serial killer. There's no mystery to the character. No fun in trying to figure out if he is or isn't, whether the suspicion is all in Michael's head, or if it is justified. The audience knows, so there is no question that certain people are going to die when they get in his way, completely destroying any tension that the film is trying to build for those scenes.

This is really what makes the film a bore to sit through. We have to sit and wait for the family to figure out that this guy is not who he says he is and for the suspicions to pile up enough to make them do something about it. Speaking of which, how many suspicions does it take before normal people would want to investigate? Three? Four maybe? For these people, it seemed to take at least ten before some of the characters decided to do something about it.

First off, there is the suspicion that he looks vaguely like the sketch from "America's Most Wanted," not really enough to say anything yet. During a conversation over lunch about his made-up daughter, David refers to her by two different names. Kind of getting strange at this point. David quits his job the very same day that he is asked to fill out paperwork about his past. A photo that Michael took of David mysterious gets deleted off of his cell phone while he is in the shower. There are more, but I think you get the point.

It takes far too many of them before any action is taken, but this action doesn't even involve calling the police, and when one of the characters tries to get a background check run on David, she changes her mind. This, however, all comes down to being an old horror film cliché, something this film has far too many off. If the characters were to act like normal people, they would act sooner and there would be much less of a movie, not that there's much of one here in the first place.

Speaking of clichés, they too pile up rather quickly. Aside from the lack of action on the characters' parts, there's just the flat-out creepy way that the killer acts. He could have at least tried to act like he wasn't a serial killer. Another obligatory moment involves a low battery on a cell phone. The ending only builds up more of these clichés. There's even a good old fashion confrontation in the pouring rain. There are multiple spots during the fight where the fight could have been ended, but, of course, the characters' only response is to run away, as if David is not going to follow them wherever they go. This is all topped off by the police arriving.....after the action has taken place.

This film desperately needed the mystery element behind David's character. By removing that, there's not much of a point in watching the film when we already know who David is. All that's left for us to do is follow the clichés to the predictable ending, which is in itself a cliché. That's leads to the second thing this film really needed: a big dose of originality. It's sad to say that that can be said of a lot of films nowadays. 2/4 stars.