The Hitcher (2007)

The 2007 remake of The Hitcher arrives with the quiet confidence of a film that believes it has done something. The original's male protagonist has been replaced by Grace Andrews, played by Sophia Bush, who endures an attempted sexual assault, fights her attacker off, and eventually puts a shotgun into him at close range. That is a gender-flip of some note, and the studio apparently requested it directly. It also happens to be the oldest move in the slasher playbook, so the gesture registers as convention more than conviction. Surrounding her is a cast of white faces and Yara Martinez in a small supporting part, and a stretch of New Mexico desert that does not care about any of this.

The film has no other business on its mind. Race goes unexamined. Class goes unexamined. The environment exists as scenery, useful for rain and headlights. The hitchhiker is a psychopath because psychopaths are frightening, not because the screenplay wishes to educate us about mental illness, and no character pauses mid-carnage to deliver a thesis. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no closing title card reciting statistics at us. Sean Bean brings a mournful quality to a man who mostly needs to stand in the road and look wet, and the film repays him with cheap shocks and severed torsos.

We can admire the efficiency of a ninety-minute chase that never pretends to be anything else. We cannot pretend it says anything else either. It is a remake, it is nasty, it is brief, and it leaves the cultural ledger almost entirely blank. There is a certain honesty in that. The film never asks to be praised for its values, only endured for its violence, and on that modest contract it delivers.