Why would you remake Straw Dogs? The question enticed me to the local multiplex last weekend. After all, the television advertising campaign for Rod Lurie’s (The Contender) latest film didn’t reveal much about the style and plot, but my fascination with Sam Peckinpah’s original version prompted me to see how such a morally complicated movie could be improved upon nearly

40 years later.

Quick answer: It can’t. At least not by Lurie, a script that unabashedly lifts 90 percent from the original, and a cast either too ill-equipped or poorly directed to bring much more than “stand there, say that” chops. James Woods reprises his one-dimensional Southern racist redneck prone to violence role from Ghosts of Mississippi, James Marsden and Kate Bosworth look as if they’ve stepped out of a Vanity Fair photo shoot, the great Walton Goggins (TV’s Justified and The Shield) is totally wasted, and Alexander Skarsgard ping pongs between country-fried wholesomeness and really handsome rapist. The Monkee’s “Going Down” is used for Tarantino effect to show how “cool” the Jaguar XJ-driving protagonists – who know all the lyrics, natch – are, but zydeco and Southern rock (Lynard Skynard? Check. Molly Hatchet? Check.) are the indigenous musical flavors that bodes ill for our Hollywood scriptwriter and his television actress wife.

How can you remake Straw Dogs without a tricycle and a rat catcher? Yes, the bear trap once again features prominently, but technology updates include cell phones (albeit with poor reception), police radios, and a nail gun (the Chekhovian implications for the film’s climax even more heavy-handed than the implement’s use in Lethal Weapon 2).

The two films are framed by the same escalation of violence between rural residents and a fish out of water married to a local woman. Economic realities forced Peckinpah to film his original in England, fortuitously granting the movie an exploration of one man embracing his own violent nature without cultural preconceptions. Lurie’s remake, however, is set in Louisiana where rednecks spouting biblical pronouncements about the apocalypse and whatnot abound – a Hollywood elitist cliché if ever one existed.

What’s missing from Lurie’s remake is the understanding that David Sumner was Peckinpah’s villain in the original. It’s easy to appreciate Dustin Hoffman’s subtle acting ability and immediate likability – and the reprehensible townsfolk who antagonize him – for the perception of his depiction of David Sumner as a champion for property rights, defender of the homestead, and a man pushed to excessive violence against his true nature. But that’s a too-easy interpretation given Sumner’s transformation from high-minded mathematician quoting Montesquieu’s attack on religion to a smirking, calculating primal killer who famously taunts an attacker, “I hope you slit your throat,” and congratulates himself after emerging victorious from a night’s carnage, “Jesus, I got them all.” Sumner’s transformation isn’t as sharply delineated as all that, however. He threatens to kill the cat, tortures it by throwing grapefruit at it, proves he’s adept at killing wildlife, and chauvinistically patronizes his wife before he goes totally Cro-Magnon on her with physical and verbal abuse. Sumner’s line-in-the sand – the defense of his home and the injured mentally incompetent he shelters – is completely arbitrary and indefensible, and his complicity in the film’s violence understood.

In Lurie’s remake Marsden’s Sumner delivers pretty much the same lines as Hoffman, but the audience is supposed to accept him as a hero who vindicates for audiences the rape of his wife, the assault upon his house, and the threatened violence toward a mentally challenged man. This is Hollywood, right? Anyone residing in the South must ipso facto embody all negative redneck stereotypes, and Lurie and Woods seize upon this to make a hash of the original film’s themes in order, this viewer supposes, to gin up the culture war between Hollywood know-it-alls and flyover country bumpkins who deny global warming, embrace their guns and religion, and more than likely genuflect to Fox News. The latter are one step away from barbarism and have already attained ideological bankruptcy, Lurie seems to suggest, and Hollywood – represented by Marsden’s screenwriter – needs to open up a can of whup-ass on them so all wrongs will be righted and progressivism may continue unhindered by the great unwashed living between U.S. coasts.

So this is the takeaway of the 2011 Straw Dogs: the time for Hollywood’s namby-pamby defense of liberal causes is over. Get in line or get up against the wall, conservative America, because Lurie and his cronies want to throw a steel trap over your head.