Just don’t think too hard

By ROGER MOORE
McCLATCHY NEWS SERVICE

“Red Dawn” is a lot funnier than you remember.

This remake is based on 1984’s Reagan-era rah-rah movie about rural footballers who run Russian invaders and their Cuban and Nicaraguan surrogates out of America. The new “Red Dawn” dispenses with a lot of that red-meat Red-State “reds” scariness and settles into a solid if silly action picture about what happens after the North Koreans invade.

Stop laughing.

A brisk news montage under the opening credits, featuring snippets of stories about global financial collapse, rogue state cyber-warfare programs, Obama and Biden warning about this threat or that foreign policy challenge, does all that any “Red Dawn” could ever do to make this plausible. Yes, the North Koreans have a huge army and a government bent on creating global chaos. No, it won’t help the movie to worry about how they could transport that army to the Pacific Northwest.

That’s where ex-jock/ current Marine Jed Eckert (Chris Hemsworth) is on leave, visiting his widowed police chief dad (Brett Cullen) and ball-hog quarterback younger sibling Matty (Josh Peck), when the paratroopers tumble in. “North Korea — it doesn’t make any sense.”

But stuntman-turned-director Dan Bradley doesn’t sit still long enough for that to sink in. In a jerky and jarring shaky-cam escape sequence, the Eckert brothers and assorted friends and hangers-on — the tech nerd (Josh Hutcherson), the mayor’s son (Connor Cruise), assorted jocks and cheerleaders — head for the hills. Or the mountains. That’s where they plot America’s comeback.

“We inherited our freedom,” Jed, who literally towers over the others, preaches. “Now it’s up to all of us to fight for it.”