Review of Freddy vs. Jason (2003) by Sean L — 31 Oct 2016

At this point, who really cares about continuity, I guess. Jason's survived being blown to bits by a SWAT team, boiled in toxic waste, drug to hell by demons and disintegrated in the atmosphere. Freddy's been crushed, impaled, pipe bombed, stripped of his powers and forgotten.

It isn't the first time we've set aside preceding stories for the sake of the next one, and in this case it's given a pass for the sake of a titular clash of legends. Only they don't actually clash until the final twenty minutes, and even then it's a bit underwhelming.

Their heavyweight brawls deliver a few brief moments of awesome, but there's always something restraining these monsters, holding them back from really cutting loose, and the big climax is predictably open-ended.

In keeping with both franchises, most of our story revolves around a tribe of empty-minded teens. Slowly, prophetically unraveling the plot, their numbers are whittled down until a pair of strong-willed survivors finally decide to fight back.

The greater saga is a bit over-reaching, introducing and abandoning several pointless subplots, but it does a fair enough job of intertwining two distinct franchises and granting legitimate reasons for Freddy and Jason to cooperate and, later, throw down.

It's trashy fun, loaded up with fan service and gruesome killings. Big and dumb and cringe-worthy, spiritually compatible with both legacies, and basically all it needed to be. I've seen much worse.