Another major drawback was that the film was so sexist; supposedly, 're-imagined', but they couldn’t administer to imagine the girls with clothes on, most of the girls were portrayed as whores who would have sex with a guy if he gave them a kind look. If anything should have been updated, it should have been the sexism used in this genre. Or is there a missing link between topless women and death scenes? (Even the girl water-skiing had to have her top off), whereas there was no male nudity at all, something again that the 1980 original had, is this movie company moving backwards, because it seems so. The stars looked like they should have been walking down Beverly Hills bordello, not a camping trail.

The film opened very much like Platinum Dunes re-make of ‘The Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ with yet more teens on a road trip to find a load of marijuana and sell it. How many road-trip teen movie cliché’s do we have to witness? Apparently, all American teens want to do is take to the road, smoke lots of weed, get drunk and have sex with inexplicably made-up and well dressed ‘campers’ with fake breasts.

The first run of deaths were the scariest and integral to the plot, but by making Jason human, with the ability of rational thought, the kidnapping of Whitney doesn't make any sense. If Jason knows his mother's dead (he keeps her head in a wall cavity) why would he want to kidnap a girl who looked like she did in her early twenties? The picture he keeps of her in a locket is a photo of his mother when she is young, not as he would remember her. I doubt a young boy would make the association between his mother, as he sees her, and a dated image of her. Whitney looks like Jason's mother when she was a young woman...so what? It's a half-baked, pointless idea to try and give the film any sense of plot or depth.

In this mess of a movie, they also tried to throw in some humour, and failed. At least Platinum Dunes kept ‘The Hills have Eyes’ and ‘Chainsaw Massacre’ re-makes dark and foreboding. If a death scene is made laughable, it is never frightening; although the fact Jason could fire an arrow into a guy’s head (who was driving a speed boat) while standing a mile away was laughable.

I’d like to comment on the characterisation of some of the characters, but for that, there would have had to been some developed in the movie, and there wasn’t. The characters were either introduced & murdered, or they were hateful, with the exception of Chewie, who had some great lines that were genuinely funny and sarcastic, but he was killed before he could make much of an impression. The main character, Clay, did have a slight back story, and actor Jared Padalecki did do his best with the very poor material on offer. Derek Mears as Jason was good, he fitted the bill; his physicality was imposing, and he even seemed to carry off the running Jason; but if Jason is human and traumatised by his mothers death, shouldn’t Jason have been able to show some of this vulnerability through the mask, either by body language or actions – such as a werewolf who doesn’t want to kill. None of this was shown, and Jason just ended up same as always, their was no empathy for the character at all.

The best thing about the original, 1980 version, was that Jason wasn’t the killer – and the story was actually feasible; a psychopath is always scarier when they’re real and not superhuman in any sense, whether that being immortal or having an amazing array of talents for a person who was supposed to be so deformed that he was rejected by society. This might have had a bigger budget, but yet again, the original surpasses the re-make with this company. Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, writers of ‘Freddy vs. Jason’, just don’t care about characterization, or simply can’t write horror. In ‘Friday the 13th’, sure it was low budget and the acting wasn’t great, but the acting wasn’t great in this 2009 version. Alice (Adrienne King) and Bill (Harry Crosby) were well developed characters that were likeable; you wanted them to escape because their characters had been developed, their was no effort to make the 2009 characters deeper than a puddle, and there were far too many of them; and they were all walking off alone constantly when Jason was on the loose; a thing that savvy, media aware teens of 09 wouldn’t do. This was just another sequel under the guise of a re-make; it was not even a good or passable sequel, save your money and watch the original, unless you fancy a laugh at the filmmakers expense.
With twelve ‘Friday the 13th’ movies, the last one being ‘Freddy Vs. Jason’ only a few years ago, everyone knows this character, everyone knows this franchise. Anyone old enough to get into see the movie has probably seen most, if not all of the others, so trying to re-vamp something not yet aged is pointless to the highest regard. Even the iconic score originally composed and performed by Harry Manfredini, was altered and hardly used.

A lot of people might argue that this is simply a slasher film, and so plot, character development and originality shouldn’t matter, I disagree with this whole heartedly, but even still, the film should include interesting or even new death’s, be enjoyable and most importantly – scary, and the fact it wasn’t any of these things is a disgrace.