Friday the 13th (2009)

Marcus Nispel's 2009 Friday the 13th arrives as the twelfth installment of a franchise that had already been pronounced dead and buried, and it carries itself with the quiet industry of a mausoleum reopening for tours. Platinum Dunes, Michael Bay's horror recycling concern, lifted plot points, kill choreography, and a hockey mask origin from the first four films and assembled them into something sleek, loud, and entirely uninterested in saying anything. The film knows precisely what it is. A young man searches for his missing sister. A man in a mask kills everyone else. The lake is wet. The machete is sharp.

The cast is stocked with the usual provisions. Jared Padalecki broods handsomely as Clay, Danielle Panabaker assists, Travis Van Winkle plays a rich jerk who exists to be hated and then dispatched, and Aaron Yoo and Arlen Escarpeta appear amid the body count with no acknowledgment beyond the bare fact of their presence. This is representation of the most passive kind, casting that neither comments nor cares. A cannabis-growing subplot offers a faint whiff of transgression and then thinks better of it. Nobody learns anything. Nobody advances a thesis.

There is no sermon here, no lesson, no message smuggled into the carnage. Jason kills because he was wronged, or because the screenplay requires it, and the film declines to investigate the difference. The architecture of the thing is pure delivery system: bodies fall, the credits roll, and we are left with the satisfying emptiness of a meal eaten standing up. The producers were explicit that they wanted a killing machine, plain and simple, and they got one. No ideology clings to the frame. A clean zero, and refreshing in its way, like a glass of water after a long evening of being lectured at by better-intentioned films.