WILLARD (2003) I'm glad I don't work for R. Lee Ermey! Bitchin' opening credits sequence. After that...not bad. Pretty slow (nice way to say it: "deliberate") and like most nerds-get-revenge movies, the setups and payoffs are all pretty predictable. But the acting and visuals help this remake of the 1971 killer-rat movie along, and if I can't quite get behind it all the way, it's pretty good for a PG-13 (holy shit, have you seen the next few months of horror releases? Everything's PG-13!). Gaunt angles, sunken cheeks, perfectly parted hair...Willard (Crispin Glover) couldn't possibly be happy sporting a look like that. He lives with his domineering harpy mother, who is left unseen for so long (yowling out commands from offscreen) that comparisons to mother Bates will occur to just about anybody. Dad's dead (big painting of Bruce Davison, star of the original film) and Willard's too much of a momma's boy to correct her when she starts calling him Clark, in hopes that a name change will make him a bigger hit with the chicks. Willard seems severely socially handicapped, unlikely to be able to make friends on his own, probably more unlikely to ever get a job anywhere should he lose his job at his late dad's office, now run by R. Lee Ermey, which ought to give you an idea of how much Willard likes his job. Ermey starts out more soft-spoken than most of his roles but no less cruel, and gradually turns up the volume until he's basically that drill sergeant all over again, if anything more mean-spirited, though remember this is PG-13 so the language is tamer. Then Willard meets a couple of rats infesting his house, befriends them, trains them, and soon enough commands vast armies of vermin. At this point, you've pretty much seen it all before, though there's a certain poignancy in Willard's WAY-over-the-top reaction to a lawyer's bad news (was this really the time and place to break this kind of news?) and it's always a nice, easy pleasure to watch a social outcast start interacting like a, you know...normal person. His revenges give him more than just confidence - they give him social skills you'd think he wouldn't even know what to do with! Glover holds nothing back (I can honestly say that I don't think I've ever seen a movie where a guy cries so hard that a big rope of snot hangs out of his nose), and why would he, since Willard seems to know no degree of emotional repression less than absolute? The effects are convincing, insofar as you can keep out of your head that what you're being shown can't possibly be accomplished using trained rats. The humor isn't too heavy-handed, and doesn't distract from the tone. So what's not to like? Well, I couldn't buy for a second that the co-worker (Laura Harring) would so take a shine to Willard, or that she's willing to give him her cat that she supposedly loves, even though he's insisting the whole time that he can't own a cat. Most pet owners would agree - only a serious change in living situation would convince us to part with the pets we actually like, and if we had to do that, we wouldn't try to force it on someone who clearly didn't want it. I couldn't buy any of the decisions she made in this movie, in no small part because of the casting; Laura Harring, you may have noticed, is capital-B-Beautiful. Not pretty, not "appealing", Beautiful, just about on a Catherine Zeta-Jones scale, the kind of Beautiful most people won't see in the flesh in their entire lives. A woman like that spends most of her day fighting off wealthy suitors and would not have time to try to ensure the mental well-being of her dorkiest co-worker. For that matter, I couldn't believe that even somebody as socially and emotionally retarded as Willard would prefer the company of rats to that of Laura Harring. Willard excuses his chronic lateness at work with his having to take care of his sick mother; while indeed his mother is sick, we never witness a connection here so how are we to tell if it's the real deal or just an excuse? It's too easy to dismiss Willard as a loser; Carrie at least was still a teenager and her mom was batshit the whole time. Norman Bates had the excuse of being batshit himself. Willard's old enough and sane enough to know better, and his mom may well have been perfectly lucid as she was raising him. The most cutting revenge Willard could have pulled off would have been to get his shit together, and possibly fuck the boss's daughter. When Ermey berates him, we understand the viciousness of his comments but do not feel the sting since he's just saying what we're all thinking anyway. The nerd-gets-revenge arc is followed through with faithfully, but it is not delivered with any sense of triumph or satisfaction, just a sense of dutifulness to its formula. I do not expect much that is unformulaic from a remake, but the timid obviousness with which Willard is moved through the movie named after him suggests to me that maybe now's a good time to start. I've come to treasure high expectations being fulfilled in a way that low expectations being thwarted doesn't match. BACK TO THE W's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE