Unnecessary, irrelevant

Rating: 6/10 (17 October 2002)

Take "Ringu", make it visually slicker, overexplain plot elements that don't really matter and remove the paranormal explanation and you have "The Ring". The moviemakers involved in the remake had the laudable idea of taking the near-perfect original plot in new directions, but all their initiatives fall flat by the 75th minute. In-depth character development is not a necessity in a genre movie, just a brief explanation will do. I can't blame the American team for trying to dig deeper, but their new ideas don't hold water and go nowhere. The actors don't even sound like they believe their own lines in a few scenes.
There are some great moments in "The Ring", but they were integrally lifted from the Japanese version. The way the story unfolds in "The Ring" may seem unoriginal to someone who has already seen "Session 9", "Stir of Echoes" and M. Night Shyamalan's work, but that would be unfair since all those movies were obviously inspired by the J-Horror wave of the late nineties, which arguably culminated with 1998's "Ringu" (although I hear the recent "Dark Water" is brilliant). If you thought "The Ring" was good and if you don't mind sub-titles, do yourself a favor and seek out movies by Kiyoshi Kurosawa ("Cure", "Seance"), Hideo Nakata ("Ringu" 1 and 2, "Dark Water"), Masayuki Ochia ("Hypnosis"), Takashi Miike ("Audition", "Visitor Q", countless others) and Higuchinsky ("Uzumaki").