Jacob's Ladder (2019 remake)

 

Jacob’s Ladder (remake) (2019)

Dir. David M. Rosenthal

Written by Jeff Buhler, Sarah Thorpe, “story by” Jake Wade Wall, Jeff Buhler, based on a screenplay by Bruce Joel Rubin

Starring Michael Ealy, Jesse Williams, Nicole Beharie

 

 

Since the original JACOB'S LADDER is one of my very favorite horror movies of all time, I can't say I approached this (loose) remake with a lot of optimism; more like morbid curiosity. Unfortunately it doesn't even offer much to be morbidly curious about. It's not bad so much as it fails to ever be even a little good, and the ways in which it fails to be good are mostly pretty boring. It's rarely outright incompetent, but at the same time there's just no evidence whatsoever that anybody involved wanted to be here or had any clear idea why it would be worth telling this story other than to ride the coattails of a more famous movie which still isn't even that famous.

 

That is, anyway, the only reason I can think of that this would be called JACOB’s LADDER. It vaguely echoes some plot elements of the original –the titular Jacob (Michael Ealy, MIRACLE AT ST. ANNA) is an American soldier back home after a foreign war (Afghanistan rather than Vietnam) and gets mixed up with an experimental drug that leads him into a paranoid, hallucinatory journey. Similar enough that you’d probably notice, but not specific enough that they’d have to worry about lawsuits if they just ripped it off. But let’s be honest here, it’s not like someone came up with a brilliant story and just later realized it kind of superficially resembled the scenario for a cult flick from 1990. Obviously somebody picked up the rights to the remake, grabbed some gigging writer (Jeff Buhler, already responsible for THE GRUDGE REMAKE [2020] and PET SEMETARY REMAKE and the screenplay for MIDNIGHT MEAT TRAIN and THE PRODIGY and recently STUDIO 666) and said “write a story we can title JACOB’S LADDER so that a small percentage of people will watch it thinking it’s the good version, and a handful of horror die-hards will check it out due to a sense of morbid curiosity.” And then when they needed re-writes and the original guy didn’t want to bother, they handed it to a personal trainer or niece or somebody that the producer knew (Sarah Thorpe, no other credits) and just said “try and cut out the stuff that sounds expensive.”

 

This is not the type of scenario that one could reasonably expect to produce great art. But it could still probably be better than this. Mostly the movie as a whole is just sort of drab and pointless, but I guess the script is maybe weak enough to qualify as outright bad, although in a bland way rather than an exotic one. The story itself is built around a pretty tepid mindfuck (and pretty nonsensical should you be inclined to try and ask pissy questions like "wait, if that's what was happening, what have I been watching up til now?") though at least it's a different mindfuck than the original. (I said "different," not "better" although I'll readily admit that the twist in the original is the worst thing about it). The fact that it's very stupid is a problem for a movie this relentlessly dour, but the bigger problem is more fundamental: it fails to ever establish a convincing baseline reality --starting with Jacob and his wife’s (Nicole Beharie, SHAME) pristine, antiseptic home with its demure, compliant newborn (!) who cries exactly once and never while anyone is sleeping-- which renders its later attempts at surrealism a dismal nonstarter. Can't disrupt reality if I never for one second believe in these characters even at their status quo.

 

And it doesn't get more convincing as the situation escalates. Early on, Jacob watches as his brother Isaac (Jesse Williams, CABIN IN THE WOODS --yes, their names are Jacob and Isaac) dies in front of him. Years later, Isaac turns up alive, apparently within walking distance of Jacob's house! And Jacob's response is... mild surprise and annoyance? He basically just drops him off at his house and goes about his business. At no point does he or his wife freak out or seem to find this shocking and inexplicable and demanding of answers. He mumbles something that the paperwork must have gotten mixed up and that's that. And Ealy (who I consider to be a terrific actor, but obviously needed a little more direction here) doesn't help matters with his disappointingly tepid performance. Very quickly, this guy is experiencing totally insane shit, and his reaction never seems to rise above "mildly perturbed." I'm sorry, but putting a five-o'clock shadow on Michael Ealy does not make him look tormented, it just makes him look hotter. And he's already borderline too hot to take seriously in the first place.

 

So yeah, it's a bad script, but it's at least committed to its dumb twist, and could, maybe, have been salvaged by some real directorial flair. But if any director was going to be able to pull that off, David M. Rosenthal --who must be a real charming guy, considering how often in his career he's been able to pull amazingly overqualified casts for completely anonymous DTV genre fare-- ain't the one to do it. The original JACOB'S LADDER is a masterclass in gritty, nightmare-fueled paranoia; this has a perfunctory sort of visual slickness that makes it feel like a gloomy car commercial, and the best it can manage in the nightmare department is that lame thing where someone's face will suddenly distort into a SCREAM mask and they’ll shout "boo!" (a trick I was already mocking as shamelessly unimaginative back when DEAD BIRDS did it like a thousand years ago). Creating a paranoid thriller is all about using the tools of cinema to create a heightened, anxious mental state, and this is just utterly, woefully unable to do it, instead drifting between hacky jump-scare scenes and languid, clunky backstory which is so rigidly built to service the goofy twist that the movie can barely even pretend to be a straight horror movie. Its problem isn't really that it's a lunkheaded cash-in trading on the good name of a classic; it's that it's just kind of boring.

 

Props for the scene near the end where he has sex with the Angel of Death, though. If the whole thing were that eccentric and melodramatic, we might actually have something here.