*snicker*

Rating: 6/10 (5 April 2017)

There's a fine line between creepy and silly, and this movie crosses it more times than most of its admirers would care to admit. A remake of the vastly superior Japanese film "Ringu", this film is about a videotape that causes everyone who watches it to die seven days later. This premise is ripe for all sorts of commentary on the novelty of video vs. more modern forms of entertainment, but this film is far too focused on being gloomy and disgusting. To be fair, there are some good moments: a scene with a horse on a ferry, the moody visuals, and a few performances. For everything that works, however, there is something that doesn't. Naomi Watts is great as the plucky journalist heroine, but the actor who plays her inexplicably psychic kid was apparently auditioning to be the next Haley Joel Osment. Brian Cox is great, too, but he has barely any screen time, and his death scene is so over-the-top as to be unintentionally hilarious. (Seriously, why did he need to bring all of his electronics to the bathroom in order to kill himself? Dude, just drop your TV in the bathtub and be done with it.)
I said that the Japanese version is better, and that's primarily because it understands what kind of story it's telling. Watts spends the bulk of the film trying to unravel the mystery behind it, but the twist is that none of it matters. How did the girl shown in the video get her psychic powers? Who shot it? None of this is ever explained, and it shouldn't be, because the only way to escape death is to show the video to someone else and pass the curse on to them. The Japanese version's scares were subtler, allowing the whole thing to build to a conclusion that would be funny if it weren't so terrifying. The American version features so many jump scares, body horror moments, and visual tricks that it's as if director Gore Verbinski didn't have any faith in the source material. I'll give him credit for a few moments here and there, but whereas the video in the original was nonsensical and otherworldly, the video in this one just looks like a really bad student film.
If you don't watch the original first, you will probably like this one a lot more. I just couldn't get over how unnecessary all of the changes were. It's more middle-of-the-road than actually bad, but it's worth watching more for how iconic it's become than its actual quality.