Movie Critic Roundup Looks at A Nightmare on Elm Street

Yahoo! Movies posted a summary of what movie critics think of A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010):

A Nightmare on Elm Street
You can’t talk about the new “Nightmare” flick without comparing Mr. Haley’s performance as Freddy to that of original baddie Robert Englund. After all, Englund played Freddy in eight films and a TV series. So how does Earle stack up?

Michael Rechtshaffen of The Hollywood Reporter writes that while there’s “admittedly something truly unsavory about Haley’s portrayal… there’s just no replacing Englund.” That said, Mr. Rechtshaffen didn’t like the movie as a whole. His bottom line: “Good luck staying awake.”

Roger Ebert is not much of a fan of this redux either. He gives the movie just one star out of four and writes that he watched the horror movie with “weary resignation.” Ebert doesn’t delve into who was the better Freddy, but Michael Phillips of the Chicago Tribune writes that, in the new movie, Jackie Earle Haley is underused. “The role asks criminally little of him beneath all that goopy melted-face makeup.”

Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gives the movie a “B-,” and compliments Haley on his “dour malevolence.” Overall, though, the EW critic calls the new “Nightmare” a “by-the-numbers bad dream that plays a little too much like a rerun.”

Filmcritic.com’s Bill Gibron really liked what he saw, giving the movie four out of five stars and calls Haley “brilliant in the role — not too comical, always too cruel — and imbued with a sinister tragedy that is hard to shake.” However, Jen Chaney of the Washington Post disagrees. She argues that while Haley “pours every bit of menace he can muster into Krueger,” she found his makeup “completely unterrifying.” Robert Englund was, in her opinion, “irreplaceable” because he “knew how to have a killer good time.”

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