‘The Crazies’ is a good example of a modern Hollywood remake of a cult independent movie, in that it’s slicker and more focused than the original, but a lot less interesting.

In tightening the story up to create a tauter thrill-ride, the makers of ‘The Crazies’ (2010 edition) have jettisoned much of the subtext and nuance of George A. Romero’s 1973 original.

The story remains the same to an admirable extent: a military-engineered virus is accidentally released into the water in a small American town, and starts to drive the population crazy. As the US military forcibly quarantine the town, a couple expecting their first baby, David and Judy, try and break the cordon and escape.

Director Breck Eisner and his writers have really streamlined the storytelling of ‘The Crazies’ to focus in on a smaller cast of characters, more closely locked in to the expanding story. So instead of being an ex-Green Beret volunteer firefighter and a nurse, the lead couple are the local Sheriff (Timothy Olyphant) and town Doctor (Radha Mitchell).

This is positive in terms of focusing the story, in that it gives our heroes reasons to be deeply involved in the developing crisis, as well as making the female lead a stronger, more professional character. Because David is now at the centre of the story, it builds in a much more controlled way than in Romero’s sprawling, ensemble original, with a measured escalation of the threat.

However, the shift in character roles may put them closer to the action, but it also makes them more conservative – whereas 1973 vintage David and Judy were unmarried and rough around the edges, here they’re married pillars of a community. It’s just one aspect which makes the worldview of the film safer and less contentious than the original – more of that later.

Olyphant and Mitchell are good, as is Brit Joe Anderson as David’s sidekick Clank (here the Deputy, in the original another vet and firefighter). Maybe it’s something about playing Sheriff (as he does in ‘Deadwood’ and ‘Justified’), but Olyphant manages to transfer some of his TV cred to the big screen here in a way he didn’t in ‘Die Hard 4.0′ (where he was an ineffectual tech-support terrorist) and ‘Hitman’ (where his bald, besuited anti-hero came across more like a grouchy baby dressed for a wedding). The leads sell the scares and the credibility of the situation, which is what a film like this needs.

And those scares are many and smart. Each crazy is a small town type turned bad, with signature weapons and methods of killing. Some of the better ones would sustain an entire straight-to-DVD slasher flick with their gimmick, and here they’re used for some sharp set-pieces: there’s a cool bit with a pitchfork, and a very good laugh-out-loud shock with a bonesaw.

There’s also a fight in the maintenance well beneath a truck that’s quite similar to one that Olyphant had in ‘Hitman’, where he fought a guy underneath a garaged train – is this some weird contractual obligation?

Anyway, the Crazies themselves are suitably horrific, with make-up that develops throughout the film to evolve them into something monstrously demented without ever looking totally fantastical, and the movie as a whole is a well paced thriller. There’s some good scares in there.

However, while the central premise is intact – on the DVD extras various parties describe ‘The Crazies’ as a story strong enough to be retold once a generation, which is probably about right – and is executed for maximum impact, a lot of Romero’s social commentary and bite is gone.

The original movie was shot through with Vietnam era cynicism, with central characters who had returned from that war deeply distrustful of the US military machine and its inability to look after either America’s citizens or its own men. At one point in the 1973 film David bitterly complains that you can’t trust the US Army, and that having been ‘in’, he and Clank can vouch for that.

While there are sympathetic military characters in that movie, they’re misused, crushed and endangered by the organisation they’re a part of. Romero shows every confrontation between civilians and the military descending into chaotic violence, and while David tries to avoid shooting at US soldiers if they can be disarmed, he doesn’t hesitate to use his Green Beret skills against them if they’re a threat.

It’s not unfair to say that Eisner’s film wusses out in this respect, trying to keep the sense of paranoia that a military machine turned on a civilian population creates, while avoiding any situation that might require the heroes of the film to turn their weapons on US troops. As opposed to the named speaking characters of the original and the palpable sense of a chaotic, heartless military establishment, the US troops in the remake are untouchable gas-masked boogeymen directed by non-specific, nefarious unseen authority.

While massacres and atrocities are committed, on the couple of occasions when the gas masks come off, the film bends over backwards to shoehorn in a note of Our Troops Are There To Protect Us And Mean Best – the troops are just following orders and don’t like it, the extreme methods used are a necessary evil to protect the wider population, the virus was supposed to be destroyed responsibly and it was all a terrible accident, etc.

This is all a bit disappointing. It’s not like there are no recent events from which the film-makers could have drawn on to infuse the film with relevance and bite, but instead we get a dab of CCTV paranoid and that’s it. Most of the original’s potent imagery of a US town under the boot of military control is skipped over.

All in all, ‘The Crazies’ (2010) has bigger and punchier shocks than the 1973 original, but doesn’t linger in the memory or raise interesting questions in the way Romero’s film did. The best part of forty years on, the original has rough edges, scenes that seem transgressive even now, and an ending that’s bleakly memorable and thematically relevant.

There’s very little of that in this movie, just the horror movie tropes of the familiar turned bad. It’s a film that’s willing to get its scares from the intimidating power of authority, but not to challenge or question it.

‘The Crazies’ (2010) is released on DVD and Blu-ray on 19 July 2010 – you can pre-order it at those links.

‘The Crazies’ (1973) is out now on DVD.