I have to tell you….I generally hate Re-Makes. But not this time.

There are time when Hollyweird gets it right and figures out what works, what carry’s the story or what was bullshit in the original. Now we are still with the Eckert boys Jed and Matt, but now we are in Spokane, Washington. Their father is a police officer, Jed is an active duty Marine with a couple of tours in the sand box, home on leave.

Now here comes commie North Korea….What timing. Did Hollywood tell that little rat bastard dictator to get up in everyones faces once the movie hits the rental market? My plan was to see this when Redbox had it for a buck and I did. So much of what is in the film, is happening now. Now I admit that having the starving troops of N. Korea invade Spokane is a little outside of reality, but hey, it’s a film….

So it happens in their neighborhood in early morning, not at High school and they make a run for the family cabin where their father send them. They hang out and Jed takes charge. One idiot kid runs off, steals their food and turns em in. Next thing ya know, ya got little N Koreans at the cabin and the kids are hiding. Now I love the changes here, the father is on the bullhorn to the kids when are hiding and says, “Go to war with these assholes and kill the piece of Shit next to me” meaning the NK leader. So of course the executions are in the movie to so the NK guy kills dear ol dad. Now we have the martyr.

The guerilla tactics are the same but different between the two films, but I actually buy what they are doing here. Ambushes in small lots inside of town. Nipping at the edges and sometimes getting inside the town and creating havoc. With Jed being a Marine and training the boys and girls, it makes sense. Patrick Swayze did not train troops.

Oh yea, the deer kill scene. Just as the last one, kid finally kills deer and then they tell him to drink the blood. He does and then Jed asks, “what did it taste like”, the kid looks at him and says don’t you know and Jed replies, “hell not, we didn’t drink that shit”. Now that was reality… One of the funniest scenes was when two of them were running from a raid and ran into a Subway to hide. The pursuing NK troops run by and suddenly they decide, hey let’s rob the food and soda and take it to camp. That…was funny.

The usual radio chatter that “the chair is against the wall” and “John has a long mustache” are heard in te evening on Radio Free America. They even get a special shout-out to the Wolverines. Their new base was inside an abandoned mine shaft. Eventually they find the hideout and they all have to run. While running and hiding they run into American SF troops looking for them. They need help getting a radio crypto unit. So into the main base they go to get it. During this whole thing the SK leader dies but so does Jed. Leaving Matt to run the group.

He does and the film ends better than the first, with Matt training lot’s of volunteers to become Wolverines!

I like to think of in times like these, that Americans would come together. Good guys would fight the bad guys, the old Good vs Evil. I still like that in movies. I guess I had to much of Audie Murphy and the guys in the white hats.

I think the film deserves your dollar at Redbox, so give it a look-see.