The Stepfather (2009)

In the opening scene of 1987′s The Stepfather, a bearded Terry O’Quinn (before he was Lost) walks into a bathroom disheveled, bloody, and clearly shaken. But all that melts away down the drain as he showers, shaves, and gets impeccably dressed in his business suit and argyle sweater vest. With an eery smile on his face, O’Quinn descends the stairs to the scene of bloody carnage below — complete with a blood-soaked teddy bear still gripped by its dead former owner. It’s bone-chilling and the perfect way to start a psychological thriller.

A re-make of that 1980s cult classic — which itself was based loosely on the story of real-life family-killer John List — starts off with similar promise but is too sanitized to offer much more. This time around, Dylan Walsh, the nice guy half of TV’s Nip/Tuck, takes on the role of the would-be family man whose dreams are repeatedly dashed by the women and their bratty kids who disappoint him. Walsh, all blue eyes and jaw, ups the ante on his predecessor in his opening scene by having a quick snack of peanut butter on toast amid the dead bodies of his first family before moving on to the next.

The new brood consists of Susan Harding (Sela Ward), her daughter and son, whom he meets in a grocery store (shopping for peanut butter, of course) and proceeds to charm his way into their lives. Fast-forward to six months later, when the family’s oldest son, high school senior Michael (Penn Badgley), comes home to find “David” engaged and shacked up with his mom. David has so far fooled the whole family and all of their friends with his corny “family is the most important thing” mantra, but Michael, a troubled teen who is fresh from a stint at military academy, isn’t buying it. And he shouldn’t: David spends far too much time behind locked basement doors to be right in the head.

Michael’s suspicions are raised even further when a nosy, cat-lady neighbor sees a story on America’s Most Wanted and comes over to warn the Hardings that their new daddy dearest looks remarkably like the police sketch of a serial family murderer. And again, when old cat lady is found at the bottom of her basement stairs with a broken neck.

Along the way, Michael enlists the help of his hot-tempered absentee dad (Jon Tenney, deserving of about 10 minutes more screen time) to check this guy out, but his efforts are thwarted when dad mysteriously stops taking his calls and texts. And he tries to get his girlfriend, Kelly (an always scantily clad Amber Heard), to help him investigate. The problem is that his investigations don’t lead anywhere. All Michael does is piss off his new stepdad enough to send him back into a murderous rage.

But why? Why David’s search for the perfect family? Why does he kill them? How long has he been at this? And if he’s been at it as long as a pointless scene with a couple of police detectives (who are never to be seen again) would have us believe, why does David seem so damn bad at it? He screws up his own back story, hasn’t planned for pesky little things like filling out W-2 forms, and can’t tell a decent lie to cover up when he gets caught. Instead, he just beats people over the head with crystal vases.

The fault here lands squarely on the shoulders of J.S. Cardone, whose indolent screenwriting never attempts to offer any answers to the burning questions a thinking audience is sure to have. If Cardone never takes us into the psycho’s head space (hello, it’s a psychological thriller!), director Nelson McCormick really should have given us more blood and guts to go on. But even in that opening scene, the dead wife and kids are so clean and serene, you might think they were taking naps rather than brutally stabbed to death. Actually, I can’t recall seeing a single pool of blood anywhere in this film.

Is that because, between the eye-candy of Gossip boy Badgley and the PG-13 rating, the target audience hasn’t even sat for the PSAT yet?

In fairness, the production values on the film are solid enough. The high-pitched thriller music violins never get heavy-handed, and a later scene when the action comes to a head is edited in impressive slow motion. The actors, too, do their best with what they’re given, with both Ward and Badgley doing a serviceable job of warding off our confusion about how such smart people are so easily duped. Walsh, in particular, masters the thin nice-guy veneer and gives us more with his sideways glances, half smiles, and creepy deadpan delivery than the brain-dead script and 12-year-old audience deserve. And Heard isn’t half bad as the voice of reason, though, for the life of me, I can’t tell why she doesn’t have a single, solitary, fully clothed scene. Seriously, Portland is the land of bikinis, tank tops, and boy shorts? Really? Portland, Oregon?

In the end, that glibness is The Stepfather’s most forgivable flaw. But the gall and greed it took to remake a perfectly good thriller into a sterile snoozefest is beyond disappointing. Lucky for them, we can’t all handle our disappointments like the stepfather does.