For a moment, I thought about staying up for 72 consecutive hours after seeing A Nightmare on Elm Street, in an effort to see if sleep deprivation increased my admiration for its bleary-eyed performances, or otherwise gave the movie any shading and nuance not heretofore detected. Such an exercise in “method reviewing,” however, would be more comparative analysis than director Samuel Bayer’s reboot of Wes Craven’s 1984 horror film deserves.

Despite hewing closely to the original in some of its set piece deaths, one’s familiarity with that horror genre touchstone is hardly a necessity. As with most movies of its ilk, the storyline here centers around a group of kids stalked by a ghastly figure, in this case the burned, dream-world presence of Freddy Krueger (Jackie Earle Haley), an old elementary school groundskeeper about whom the small burgh’s other adults have been harboring an old secret. Once the babe and the only guy whose jerky-surly demeanor seems capable of infusing some personality into the proceedings (Katie Cassidy, above, and Thomas Dekker, respectively) are dispatched, that leaves audiences stuck with high school drabs Nancy (Rooney Mara, younger sister of Kate Mara) and Quentin (Kyle Gallner), as they try to unravel the mystery of why they’re suddenly being dream-stalked by the same menacing figure.

There’s a bit of an expanded backstory for Krueger here, but not much in Wesley Strick and Eric Heisserer’s screenplay to make one feel anything very deeply. The introduced notion of “micro-naps” (a sort of auto-sleep function of the human brain that kicks in after two-plus days without sleep, and results in auditory and visual hallucinations) provides a ready-made template for some interesting narrative hiccups and head feints about how Krueger enters the consciousnesses of his victims, but the filmmakers massively drop the ball in this regard. Neither does the script have any sort of genuine, fevered investigative pop. Apart from a cursory dab of over-emoting spread thinly over two scenes, none of the characters seems particularly thrown for a loop that, you know, there is a character (at this point they don’t even know he is essentially the spirit of a real person) who can physically kill them only in their sleep; at one point Quentin just blurts out, “If you die in your dreams, you die in real life,” which seems like lazy self-diagnosis, even for a horror film that doesn’t particularly seem to aspire to anything beyond a healthy opening weekend gross. In making the thrust of the movie a search for who Krueger is rather than why he is suddenly tormenting them, A Nightmare on Elm Street comes across like nothing so much as a boring, gory junior detective procedural.

Bayer, the director of some of the most seminal music video clips of the past quarter century, including Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” has a firm grasp of the technology at his disposal, no doubt; he lights effectively for mood, and figures out a few evocative framing devices, though I could have done without the re-up of the iconic ob-gyn-style point-of-view bathtub shot, which manages to come across as both skeevy and inappropriately humorous at the same time. Chiefly, though, A Nightmare on Elm Street is a misfire of imagination. Its sound effects-driven “boo scares” evoke a small clutch of familiar responses, but Haley’s voice, as Krueger, is so heavily processed and amplified that it has a divorcing effect from the darkness of the plotline, which is the enveloping swirl of psychological trauma resulting from child abuse. That’s a real horror, and this Nightmare on Elm Street glosses over it entirely, using it only for cheap, gimmicky effect. (Warner Bros./New Line, R, 96 minutes)

Brendan Fraser makes a play for family audiences with Furry Vengeance, a slapstick misfire of epic proportions. Even by downwardly adjusted expectations and more forgiving standards of movies in which anthropomorphized animals do battle with humans, Furry Vengeance is witless and wince-inducing. Unsuspecting family audiences could be roped in during its debut weekend, but the movie should otherwise sink with deadly word-of-mouth, finding second wind in ancillary markets only as an innocuous video babysitter. For the full review, from Screen International, click here. (Summit, PG, 91 minutes)

Its string of lesser sequels coined the derisive term “Death Wish cinema,” as well as unfortunately relegating Charles Bronson to something of a joke, but tony revenge tales with well-groomed or otherwise unlikely protagonists, from Jodie Foster’s The Brave One to last year’s first-quarter smash hit Taken, continue to crop up at the rate of three or four a year, and will always be a part of moviemaking as long as people have reason to fear for their families (which is to say as long as people have families). The gritty, engaging Harry Brown again proves this sub-genre is not purely some aggressive Stateside phenomenon. Michael Caine has cycled through his share of kindly butlers and gruff mentors of late, but his starring role as the titular avenging pensioner helps give this tale a robustness, mooring and social relevance lacking in many such films.

Harry Brown unfolds in London’s East End, against a backdrop of marauding, tension and despair. After his old pal Len Atwell (David Bradley), a fellow retiree, gets beaten to death by a group of thug teenagers, 76-year-old veteran Harry is devastated, and more than a bit scared. He doesn’t immediately start taking measures to try to make sure those responsible are brought to justice, however; like Len, he’s set upon at night, returning home from a local pub. His first act of violence is also one of defense, stabbing his attacker with a bayonet from an old Army rifle.

Meanwhile, dedicated and by-the-book detective inspector Alice Frampton (Emily Mortimer), along with her more skeptical partner, Andrew Childs (Iain Glen), are tasked by their boss with bringing this area under control, before its tensions completely boil over. They interview Harry, and arrest a gaggle of local ne’er-do-wells in Len’s death, including sneering sociopath Noel Winters (Ben Drew). Unable to completely crack their wall of silence, however, they eventually have to let the kids go. It’s at this point that Harry becomes a more proactive force of violent counterweight. Alice has suspicions about what Harry is up to, and works to bring him to justice, but isn’t able to seal the deal before a mini-riot at the neighborhood’s high-rise dwelling puts many more people in jeopardy.

Working with cinematographer Martin Ruhe (Anton Corbijn’s Control, Julie Delpy’s The Countess), debut feature director Daniel Barber crafts an unnerving, kinetic, point-of-view opening to the movie (some of the kids take cell phone video-camera footage of their exploits), but never allows Harry Brown to tip over into a jittery piece of caffeinated vengeance. It’s perfectly modulated, balanced between austere and modern. The grimy, brown-and-grey color palette convincingly communicates a setting that is oppressive and stifling for all those involved — it conveys the squalor, lack of opportunity and attendant acting out for adolescents, while also capturing the resultant fear of a general, law-abiding populace who has to keep their eyes down lest they be accused of looking askance at someone.

Martin Phipps and Ruth Barrett’s score ably portends doom, rumbling like an ominous church organ at times, and while Gary Young’s script isn’t necessarily revelatory, it does allow for a small handful of twists. Its chief asset may actually be its cleanly delineated structure, which allows for a couple remarkable long-play scenes to unfold slowly and naturally — one in a drug den, where Harry goes to try to secure a gun, and another an interrogation sequence in which Alice remains cool and collected in the face of Ben’s nasty rants. While matters of violence are at its core, Harry Brown isn’t a movie that feels the need to goad or prod viewers all that unnecessarily with flashes of stylistic excess, and this works quite well, in lockstep with its shuffling protagonist. It’s a kind of urban western, in a way. Things only get a bit hairy in its gone-to-hell finale, which (unsurprisingly, I guess) favors brawny crescendo over something more muted.

Through this all, Caine delivers a performance befitting his experience, and in line with some of his strengths — an ability to convey anxiety or swallowed fear within physical stillness. Informed by the crumbling social structures around him, Harry’s journey is an honest one. It may not be marked by choices all of us would make in our own lives, but it rings true. Because, after all, the capacity for violence exists in all of us. (Samuel Goldwyn, R, 101 minutes)