Of course, there's a landline!

Well, after 18 months' wait, we finally get to see what Platinum Dunes have made of the legend of Jason Voorhees. It's been a week now since I saw it, and I'm still not sure what to make of it.

It was slick, efficient and action-packed. Jason looked cool, there were some fun moments and it fulfilled its own brief to update the whole Crystal Lake mythology.

But in its efforts to race through the key moments of the first three movies, it felt like a greatest hits megamix rather than a film in its own right. There was the prologue with Mrs Voorhees, then the prologue with the weed-hunters, then the film proper. By the time the main characters were introduced there was only about an hour to go. Thankfully this did at least spare us the mind-numbing tedium of 'final girl third act' - a long standing staple of the series. Anyone who has sat with their finger hovering over the fast forward button while Alice boils a kettle and makes tea in Sean Cunnigham's original, will know what I mean.

The film also never touched upon the central plot hole that lies at the heart of any Friday 13th movie - who's avenging who? How can Mrs Voorhees claim revenge for the death of a son who isn't dead? And surely Jason must shoulder some of the blame for his mother's decapitation, since his faked demise was the reason for her going fucking mental in the first place...

Anyway, I've found that it's best not to scrutinise a Friday movie for logic. Although, kudos to the film makers for at least allowing their characters to do what any reasonable person would do in these circumstances. They phone the police. OK, we still get the "I can't get a signal on my cell phone" dialogue, and Jason still knows exactly how to kill a landline dead. But for a brief moment, the phone was working and the meat puppets thought to use it.

Oh, and one more thing. Enough with the fake tits. There's no quicker way to kill my belief in a movie than by casting someone with huge plastic boobs as a regular teenager. Freddy vs Jason made the same mistake and it's seriously distracting.

So all in all, I'd give it a 6.5 as a movie, and an 8.5 as a Friday movie. Have you seen it? What did you think?