Yes. Last night I went to see The Strangers. Before I get into the gist of this review, let me first say one of my biggest pet peeves in movies throughout the last 15 years is movies that don’t end conclusively. The movie mills seem to relish leaving a door open for a possible sequel by just not really wrapping everything up.
OK, with that out of the way, let me be honest and say that really this isn’t a movie that you watch to see how it ends. You have a good idea how it ends in the first scene of the movie. This is more a movie about how you get from point A to point B. But unfortunately for The Strangers, the trip is not worth the admission price. In fact, it might not even be worth a negative admission price that puts money in my pocket.
But I digress…
If I had to come up with a brief synopsis of this movie it would simply be “Two idiots gets murdered in a house.” This says more about this movie than anything else.
Liv Tyler was pretty much exactly the wrong choice for this role. She spends most of the movie stumbling, crawling around and basically being as helpless as possible. Her one shining achievement is that she crawls to a barn behind the house, tries to use a radio, fails, and then crawls back into the house so she can get murdered. And, really, that’s what this movie is about…people that can’t figure out that “escape” means to move as far as possible away from the place you wish to escape from.
This movie would have been better as a zombie film. This was on my mind throughout the movie. I mean, in zombie movies, you just expect people to sound helpless and fall over themselves so the idiocy displayed by Liv Tyler and whats-his-face would have been more understandable. I began imagining to myself that every time one of the strangers appeared on the screen they were mumbling “brainssss….” and this helped ease the pain somewhat.
To put this in perspective, here’s a brief synopsis of all actions taken by characters in the movie:
Liv Tyler: Takes a bath. Smokes cigarettes. Talks. Tries to make panicky phone call. Freaks out. Tries to escape but decides freaking out in a house filled with murderers is a better plan. Runs/crawls to barn, uses radio, crawls back to house. Freaks out more. Hides unsuccessfully. Killed. Sort of. Maybe.
Whats-his-face: Looks sad. Eats ice cream. Goes to store. Comes home. Freaks out. Shoots and kills his best friend. Tries to escape, but decides that sitting in the house is better. Runs out of house and disappears for most of the rest of the movie but comes back to get killed right at the end.
Whats-his-face’s best friend: Upon finding a house with the door wide open and gigantic shotgun pockmarks in the walls, decides to stealthily enter totally unarmed and is summarily killed.
There you go, you’ve just seen this movie. EXCEPT THERE’S A CATCH. Of course, it ends inconclusively with a hint of more and more sequels. Liv Tyler may not have died after all, although if she’s in a sequel it may be a sure sign of the death of her acting career. The Strangers go out and look like they’re going to kill more people. Roll credits.
Fun Fact: Liv Tyler makes a wardrobe change for the final scene in which she is killed. Why? No idea. I mean, I guess it might have been awfully kind for her captors to allow her to change into a nightgown before they kill her, but I’m going to go with laziness/slopiness as the more likely candidate for this.
