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[petzipellepingo.livejournal.com]

'Let Me In' is stylish remake of Swedish vampire tale

BY ROGER MOORE
ORLANDO SENTINEL

There are monsters who wander the halls of our schools, selecting victims, destroying lives.

We call them bullies. And they're the real beasts of Matt Reeves' "Let Me In," his bloody remake of "Let the Right One In," the Swedish tween vampire hit from 2008. Sure, the film's star bloodsucker unleashes some horrors, but they're not as immediate as the no-holds-barred brutality inflicted on poor Owen (Kodi Smit-McPhee) by a gang of tormenting middle schoolers.
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Owen is an odd 12-year-old, a sad, sensitive loner who steals from his mom's purse so he can buy candy. He's the sort of skinny kid who doesn't join in most sports and who earns daily assaults and atomic wedgies for it.

But Owen has a new neighbor. She's his age, but she's strange. It's winter and she sometimes doesn't wear shoes out into the snow. Her dad (the peerless Richard Jenkins) is secretive and strange. Still, Owen needs a friend.

"Just so you know, I can't be your friend" are pretty much the first words out of her mouth. "That's just the way it is."

Owen is smitten, understandable since Abby is played by the beguiling Chloe Moretz ("Kick Ass," "Diary of a Wimpy Kid"). And eventually, she relents on the whole friend thing. She's a vampire. All he has to do is invite her in.

Reeves has reset the story in Los Alamos, N.M., in 1983, and he makes Owen's mom a religious character who's bitter over her impending divorce. The "Cloverfield" director also tells chunks of the story in flashback, following a cop (Elias Koteas) who is trying to figure whether a "satanic cult" is behind the rash of ritual murders that now rivet the town.

Smit-McPhee ("The Road") suggests an innocent creepiness. He's a child who peeks in on his sexy neighbors through his telescope and practices face-offs with his school tormentors with a newly bought pocket knife. His Owen seems childish, but capable of terrible things.

Moretz is on a path to become the next Jodie Foster. Her performances are always good, but in her last two films, directors have sexualized her by giving her Lolita-like lighting and costumes. As bad boy Kenny, Dylan Minnette is every amoral 12-year-old villain you've ever read about -- a sociopath in a Justin Bieber bowl cut. Minnette's bullying menace reminded me of Matt Dillon's early teen-thug performances.

The digitally augmented vampire attacks are marginally more convincing than the ones in the "Twilight" films, but "Let Me In" offers only a couple of jolts in the fright department. Still by casting Jenkins as Abby's tormented dad, by illustrating how bullies are made (it's passed down) and by maintaining through every blue and amber winterscape a genuine sense of disquiet, Reeves triumphs. He has Americanized a very good foreign film without defanging it.

http://www.freep.com/article/20100930/ENT01/10010302/1035/ent#ixzz1108IwlDT