The Hitcher: Critic Reviews

... about all the movie is effective at is insulting the audience.

Like the same-titled 1986 cult favorite, this remake is a crash-and-burn action horror with intellectual pretensions.

Tense, brooding, scary -- there are plenty of words to describe 1986's superior B-movie The Hitcher. None, however, apply to this remake.

Don't even think of stopping.

No one's going to argue that the 1986 psycho-thriller The Hitcher was a pillar of world cinema, but it had a scuzzy originality. The remake, by default, lacks even that. I don't think I've seen a movie with less reason to exist.

Ultimately, this is a bit of trash that will most comfortably line the cages of those who have no memory or attachment to the original. This in itself is an idea more terrifying than anything portrayed in The Hitcher.

The screenplay disastrously rewrites the original's climax, turning Bush's college waif into an indestructible female Terminator who can unerringly fire a police-issue riot gun and kick a steel paddy-wagon door off its hinges.

Perhaps most unforgivably, pic lacks suspense. The action scenes are directed credibly enough, but the nail-biting buildups and awful aftermaths are laid out mechanically and drained of emotional effect.

[It's] cheerfully in touch with its own brainlessness.

A stylish, jolting remake that has some of the virtues, but also the dramatically unsatisfying, amoral plot points as the original.

The movie doesn't make a lick of sense, but then neither did the original. There are enough shocks to keep it going but all thoughts of originality also perish on the side of the road.

There's no snowball effect and the characters are too weakly drawn and acted for there to be any psychological dimension to their interaction. The ending of the first movie was unsettling; the conclusion of this one is unsatisfying.

Probably the nerviest move on filmmaker Dave Meyers' part was to include a clip from Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, well demonstrating just how far we've descended when it comes to cinematic suspense.

There are several good jumps and scares, and it's surprisingly tense the whole way through, not just gory and cheesy.

That [original] film was intellectually engaging as well as tangibly creepy, while the new remake is just plain bad, and boring to boot.

The new version is an adequate technical exercise ... but the attempts at 'originality' undermine whatever meager integrity the original possessed.

For my taste, it was better off left dead, roadkill on the cinematic highway.

While this new Hitcher has its moments, it just doesn't make for as scary or interesting a ride as its predecessor.

Enjoyably trashy remake with a suitably creepy performance from Sean Bean, even if it's not quite on the level of Rutger Hauer's original.

As is usually the case with remakes of this sort, instead of soul, point of view, or guts, the movie features a story as flat as its open surroundings, transparent like soda water, with as many holes as bubbles, and a few slices of improbability for flavo

The first few minutes of Dave Meyers's remake of The Hitcher are desperately tense.