Cast: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox, Jane Alexander, Lindsay Frost, Amber Tamblyn, Rachael Bella, Daveigh Chase, Shannon Cochran, Sandra Thigpen. Screenplay: Ehren Kruger, based on a novel by Koji Suzuki and a screenplay by Hiroshi Takahashi. Cinematography: Bojan Bazelli. Production design: Tom Duffield. Film editing: Craig Wood. Music: Hans Zimmer.
There's not much chance of watching any videotape these days, let alone a haunted one, so if The Ring were remade today it would have to be ... what? A murderous TikTok? A satanic tweet? (Though maybe we've had a few of those lately.) That's just to say that horror films become obsolete quickly, unless they're made with a surer hand than Gore Verbinski's. The director strives for a sense of gathering doom in his film, using gloomy weather and isolated settings to good effect, but even the creepy video looks like nothing more than, as Martin Henderson's Noah suggests, a short made by a student in a film class. Naomi Watts is, as always, effective, and she gets good support from Henderson and young David Dorfman as the genre's familiar weird little kid. Huge talents like Brian Cox and Jane Alexander are welcome in their small roles. But the film doesn't give them enough substance as characters for me to feel concerned about their fate, and the supposedly threatening closing scene, in which it's hinted that we're all at risk because we've watched the video ourselves, falls flat.
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