‘The Hitcher’ almost
gets a thumbs-up

At the Movies
By Senitra Horbrook

It’s a lesson many learned in driver’s ed — never pick up strangers. The main characters in The Hitcher conveniently forgot that important lesson, and for 90 minutes they pay dearly for it.
The Hitcher is a remake of a 1986 film that starred C. Thomas Howell and Rutger Hauer. I had never heard of or seen the original, so unfortunately I can’t compare the two. From my understanding, the 1986 film made people wary of the wackos standing in the middle of the road, as well as to double-check their diner french fries. Sorry fans, there’s no french-fry scene in this picture.
But my thinking is that if The Hitcher was a sub-par ’80s slasher flick, why remake it 21 years later? Movies like When a Stranger Calls and Black Christmas prove there’s an audience for bad remakes, so I suppose that’s my answer.
I can’t imagine that many directors were lining up at the door to put their mark on the movie, but Dave Myers deserves some credit here. He certainly seemed tapped into the teenage genre, having directed more than 100 music videos, including those for the likes of Britney Spears and Missy Elliot.
There’s not much plot in this film. Jim (Zachary Knighton) and Grace (Sophia Bush) are two college students on their way to spring break in Lake Havasu, Ariz. While driving through New Mexico on a rainy night, they narrowly avoid hitting a man standing in the middle of road.
They see he’s OK and drive off, thinking they’ll send help for him once they get to a gas station. But the man manages to hitch a ride to the same gas station where Jim is asking the clerk to send a tow truck.
There’s no tow truck at such a late hour, so the stranger — who identifies himself as John Ryder (Sean Bean) — asks Jim to drop him off at a hotel 15 miles away.
It’s soon obvious that John has no intention of going to a hotel. He pulls a knife on Jim and Grace, but Jim manages to eject the guy from the car and speeds off. Jim and Grace are relieved, but as you can imagine, this only ticks off the guy even more, and he proves to be relentless, terrorizing them and killing others in the process. Their vacation trip becomes an even bigger headache when the killer starts framing Jim and Grace for the murders.
Sean Bean won’t exactly be remembered for this role, but he makes a decent villain. He’s creepy, and what you’d imagine a psychopathic killer to be like.
Sophia Bush (from the CW’s series One Tree Hill) pulls off the female version of C. Thomas Howell’s 1986 character. However, the character of Jim was pretty pointless; Knighton doesn’t put much life into his role.
I was intrigued throughout The Hitcher. The problem, however, is that the standard horror movie questions — questions like “What do you want from me?” and “Why are you doing this?” — were never answered. I kept waiting for one of those “a-ha” twist moments, but I guess that was just expecting the movie to be smarter than I.
The film has some nice car-chase action scenes, and there even are some moments that make you jump. But the plot is very thin. John Ryder apparently is a one-man wrecking crew who can single-handedly knock off a bunch of police. And his intuition was excellent — he seemed to know every move Jim and Grace were going to make before they made it.
Even with all the negatives going for it, The Hitcher actually turned out better than I expected. It is not your typical gore fest. Yes, there’s some killing and a fair amount of fake blood, but that comes with the territory in these films. The plot has holes, and you’ll have moments of disbelief, but I still found The Hitcher more entertaining than other horror films I’ve seen in recent months. ••
Movie Grade: B