Freddy vs. Jason (2003)

Two aging boogeymen are hauled out of storage and made to punch each other for ninety-seven minutes. That is the entire proposition of Freddy vs. Jason, and the film has the good manners not to pretend otherwise. Ronny Yu directs with a certain music-video brio, the cornfield rave is duly demolished, the psychiatric hospital returns from Dream Warriors, and Robert Englund collects a final paycheck as the dream demon with the weary efficiency of a man who knows exactly what he is selling. The mythology is thick, the fan service thicker, and the whole enterprise runs on the simple arithmetic of two mascots meeting at a lake.

Measured against the cultural sensibilities that would dominate the following decade, the film is a near vacuum. There is no courtship of representation as a project, though Kelly Rowland appears as Kia and brings more presence to the role than the screenplay requires. Race goes unremarked. So does everything else. No character wrestles with identity, no villain stands in for corporate greed, no weather event carries a moral. The patients at Westin Hills exist to be drugged and slaughtered, not to illuminate anything about the mind. The women survive in the manner slasher convention has always permitted, which is to say the last girl stands and the rest are furniture. None of this reflects a failure of nerve. It is a film made before anyone thought to ask.

The closest thing to a thesis is the versus in the title. Freddy wants fear, Jason wants bodies, and the screenplay wants a fight. It delivers. We are left with a curious artifact: loud, silly, occasionally ingenious, and entirely innocent of the sermonizing that would soon become standard practice. Some will file it away as a relic. This critic files it as a vacation.