Thirteen

Horror / Thriller

Icon Home Entertainment

R4

In common with the current U.S. practice of remaking older films, including foreign ones, this film is a remake of a French film from 2005 called 13 Tzameti. We reviewed this in 2008 in Synergy. It was a budget film that relied on a simple plot and good acting but it had one big drawback – it was in French, subtitled. It seems U.S. audiences are simply too lazy to read subtitles so a remake seemed like a good idea. It would also be a chance to tighten up the French film which was a little slow getting started. I was encouraged when I found Gela Babluani, the writer of the French film, was to write the script for this film as well. Too often a film loses out badly when a new director puts his own spin on a remake.

The story gets moving faster than the original. It involves a young man, Jack, who is desperate for money to pay for his dad’s medical bills. He takes over a dead man’s role in an unknown “game” and finds he is now one of the participants in a high-stakes Russian Roulette tournament. The participants stand in a circle pointing a gun with one bullet at the man in front, then fire on a signal. Survivors go on to the next round and get two bullets. And so on. The final test is a face-to-face confrontation from which only one man can walk away. He is reticent to take part but is left no choice. His sponsor needs a gunman and if he tries to back out he will be shot. No gunman, no betting, and the bets run into millions of dollars.

The film retains the tension of the matches but loses much of the character development of the gunmen. In the original some gunmen almost become friends, but know that in the next round they may have to kill their new friend. This is largely disregarded in the remake. The greed of the gamblers is well brought out and their completely amoral nature is covered much as in the original. The final part of the story reflects the French film accurately, but I won’t give away the ending.

Now the bad bits. Although the publicity promotes Jason Statham strongly he only gets about five minutes of the film. He is really only window dressing to make the film look bigger than it is. Alexander Skarsgard, a rising pretty boy Swedish actor, manages to go through the whole film looking like he is on Valium and the verge of tears. No matter how good the actor, this remake just doesn’t give them much to work with.

Although Gela Babluani had a lot to do with the script he does not seem to have had enough influence on the production. The chance to refine his original film has been rather wasted in an attempt to give the film more mass appeal. That’s not to say it is a bad film. It is really quite good, and the tension before each game is faithfully built up. It hasn’t been too Americanised (how do you get Family Values and God into such a film?).

I am of two minds about whether it is a better film than Babluani’s original. I guess if you don’t like subtitles, get the remake. It’s a little softer than the French version but a little tighter in the editing. Well worth watching.

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