Josh Peck, Josh Hutcherson, and Chris Hemsworth (Getty Images)

In the summer of 1984, with “Morning in America” well underway and a national election heating up, our Cold War skittishness was quickly giving way to militant triumphalism. The year before, the U.S. had invaded Grenada. Over the summer, a team of America’s best and brightest athletes rebounded from our boycott of the 1980 Moscow Games with a big, showy display of American exceptionalism held in Los Angeles, the city America goes to for lies about itself. And the weekend of the closing ceremony, a movie called Red Dawn opened in theaters, sparking the interest of a nation of impressionable kids raised in fear of what lay on the other side of an ever-shrinking world.

Set in a small town in Colorado, the original Red Dawn, a remake of which hits theaters November 21, posited a takeover of the country by a Cuban-Soviet alliance. A group of high schoolers stocking up at the friendly local sporting goods store adopt the name “The Wolverines,” after their school mascot, and take to the hills to mount an uprising against the invading forces. “In Our Time, No Foreign Army Has Ever Occupied American Soil,” one movie poster noted. “Until Now.”

“What both films succeed in doing is asking: ‘What if the fight was brought to your front door?’” noted Josh Peck, who has the lead role in the remake. “Everyone would have a visceral reaction to their home being threatened.” He noted that even a natural disaster, Hurricane Sandy for instance, could pose that sort of threat. In either case, tough decisions are necessary in times of crisis.

“The original came out at a time when kids were still hiding under their desks,” Mr. Peck added. “It was able to take advantage of the political climate. With this film, there was an effort to root it in reality.”

That means both a grittily realistic style of action—you really feel each grenade going off—and obtuse nods at the national scene, as in an opening sequence that edits together speeches by the real-life President, Vice President and Secretary of State to make them appear excruciatingly ineffective in battling the fictional Axis rising in the East. And just as the original film became a touchstone for the Patriot movement, the remake is poised, for a sizable segment of its audience, to speak to the despair over President Obama’s perceived incompetence and/or craven malevolence (take your pick) and his supposed second-term agenda of dismantling the free state.

Appeals to patriotism aside, neither version of Red Dawn is likely be screened at the Library of Congress. The 1984 version is most easily seen today as a dopey popcorn flick celebrating unity and fellowship among high schoolers, a time capsule of 1980s teen culture (among its stars: Patrick Swayze, Lea Thompson, Charlie Sheen and Jennifer Grey) or a straight-up action movie. But its director, John Milius—who also co-wrote the first two Dirty Harry movies and directed Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian—may have had something else in mind with his story of a robust last-ditch national defense mounted by a well-armed citizenry. Not for nothing was the film listed among the National Review’s “Best Conservative Movies of the Last 25 Years.” And Mr. Milius is not your typical sushi-eating Hollywood elitist. A longtime member of the National Rifle Association’s board of directors, he has called for “mass denunciations and executions” of Wall Street leaders and for U.S. military intervention in Mexico’s drug-trafficking crisis. “We need to go down there, kill them all, flatten the place with bulldozers, so when you wake up in the morning, there’s nothing there,” he has said, adding, “I do believe if you have a military, you use it.”

But what if the military is actually in cahoots with the enemy? The new Red Dawn, which replaces Soviet soldiers with North Koreans and stars boys of the moment Mr. Peck, Chris Hemsworth and Josh Hutcherson, comes at a time when the newly re-elected commander in chief of the Armed Forces is believed by a not insubstantial portion of the electorate to himself be an invader from abroad. The conversation on Twitter about this new film contains both the typical, studio-stoked hype (“This Thanksgiving we FIGHT for our freedom!,” wrote the operator of the film’s official feed) and something a bit more edgy. As one self-proclaimed veteran of the war in Afghanistan put it, “If Obama raises our taxes it is going to be like the movie Red Dawn in these parts.”

But the congruence between the despair over Mr. Obama’s re-election and the picture’s release is just coincidental. The film was originally intended to premiere just after the 2010 midterms, but was delayed until this year due to financing issues with MGM; during that time, post-production tricks were used to change the villains from Chinese invaders to North Koreans, reportedly due to the studio’s desire to retain a relationship with the growing Chinese moviegoing audience.

Of course, it’s effectively irrelevant which nation, specifically, is invading the suburbs of Spokane. “Personally, for me, it’s a fantasy action film,” said producer Tripp Vinson. “You need to create a situation where you put these teenagers in a high-pressure situation. We only cut to the bad guys two or three times.”

Neither Mr. Vinson’s nor director Dan Bradley’s résumés are especially political, aside from the new film. Indeed, Mr. Vinson suggested that the film would be an ideal distraction after a contentious election: “I don’t want to deal with politics. I want to see a kick-ass action movie and eat popcorn.” The cast has become well-known for starring in action flicks, after Mr. Hemsworth’s role in The Avengers (in which a group of ultra-qualified supermen come to the rescue of an Earth full of mediocrities), Josh Hutcherson’s performance in The Hunger Games (in which a group of idealistic teens fight to overthrow a decadent regime that thrives on death and lies to its citizens) and Isabel Lucas’s part in Transformers (... who knows, really?). And yet the film contains a few right-wing dog whistles that play into the militia fantasies still harbored by members of the conservative fringe.

The opening sequence, starring President Obama and depicting an America weakened by recession and thus unable to deal with the gathering storm, was the product of consultation with the RAND Corporation; the military-industrial think tank helped craft a geopolitical potboiler that showed “this domino effect of how the world could go to shit,” Mr. Vinson said. Posters prominently displayed throughout post-invasion Spokane (a world in which nearly every citizen is quietly united in their loathing for their new overlords, though only a few heroic individuals have the fortitude to take them on) indicate that North Korea’s sell is not so very different from the Democrats’ 2008 election pitch: “Helping You Back on Your Feet” and “Fighting Corporate Corruption.” In a speech to the assembled citizenry, a North Korean potentate tells his new subjects: “You, too, are victims. Greed, irresponsibility and fraud were encouraged by a corrupt government in bed with Wall Street.” The villainous foreign interlopers also try to convince the populace that they are entitled and to promote that age-old conservative bête noire—a culture of victimization.

Red Dawn’s America is one of rugged individualists defining true citizenship along deeply familiar lines: the protagonist, played by Mr. Peck, plays in a football game at the film’s start, pausing to get a bit of advice from his cheerleader girlfriend (Ms. Lucas). Mr. Peck’s brother is a veteran back to check in on dad, the town’s sheriff. The family has maintained a cabin in the woods stocked with canned food and ammo. In the era of popular reality series like Doomsday Preppers and an internet burbling with threats against Mr. Obama, we’re on familiar terrain. Spokane, the film’s setting, may be just another local stronghold; in real life, it’s the site of a thwarted Martin Luther King Jr. Day bombing in 2011.

“The defendant stated that he needed to make sure that everyone is fed up with [President] Obama,” read the would-be bomber’s sentencing memorandum.

“[F]or many of us, it feels that the things we hold most dear as Americans just don’t seem as secure as they once were,” Mr. Bradley, the director, observed in the film’s press notes.

It may be a cynical way to market a film, but it could also prove a smart one. Amid all the post-election discontent, one detects more than a touch of Red Dawn defiance, as when Fox News contributor Monica Crowley urged in a blog post, “We MUST ... and more importantly CAN ... fight” the President (who would be ultimately discredited, she hypothesized, after the U.S. economy collapsed once again and conservatism rose).

“America CAN be saved, and she is WORTH SAVING,” Ms. Crowley added, sounding in her appeal to patriotism and her self-conscious melodrama like an uncredited co-writer of the film. As Mr. Hemsworth puts it in the film, “For them, this is just a place. For us, this is our home!”

As a commenter on Glenn Beck’s website The Blaze put it immediately after the election, “The future is either Red Dawn or Ron Paul—i dont see any other options.”

And maybe—just maybe—the future really will be Red Dawn. Not that insurrection is coming, exactly. But Politico has termed the upcoming generation of unapologetically arch-conservative lawmakers (think Marco Rubio or Ted Cruz) the “Red Dawn Republicans”—claiming for themselves leadership and firing at will after a flailing older generation has been overrun.

“When you’re dealing with things like your community, family, neighborhood, your home, and you have to step up and defend it,” Mr. Vinson pointed out, “that’s a fun fantasy that people think about.”

Not the least of the problems facing people who write about movies on a weekly basis is the deadlines. You can’t say, “I think I’d rather go to the beach today.” The empty space looms at you like a computerized monster, always demanding to be filled with your words, whether you have anything to say or not. Also, they say as you get older your attention span shortens. I don’t know about that, but I can promise you as sure as Monday follows the weekend that as the world changes and filmmakers get younger, the quality of motion pictures has diminished, and I find very few movies of worthwhile value to hold my interest. Writing about movies has become a chore, not a pleasure.

And so the Fourth of July holiday now brings a whole new batch of rubbish that is not worth coming in from the barbecue to write about. You can start with a mutton-headed waste of time called The Wackness that is every bit as moronic and meaningless as its title. You see them all the time: movies that just don’t move or signify or engage. This is one of them. Set in 1994 for no reason except that’s the year the film’s incompetent writer-director, Jonathan Levine, graduated from high school, it stars a doughy wonk with a face like a Big Mac bun named Josh Peck, as a teenage drug dealer named Luke, who trades weed for sessions with a zonked-out shrink named Dr. Squires. Sad to see Ben Kingsley trashing his reputation to play this stoned therapist, who looks like a Bowery bum as he pumps a dreadlocked Lolita (Mary-Kate Olsen) in a phone booth and dispenses mush-tongued jabberwocky in a fog of marijuana. The doctor (prove it) is an old degenerate who lusts after little girls; snorts and smokes every drug he can get his hands on; and blames everything on Giuliani. I guess it’s no coincidence that 1994 is also the inaugural year of New York’s right-wing mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who declared war on graffiti, nudity in museums, and portable radios. Instead of cracking down on Times Square porno flicks, he should have dragged in junk peddlers like the pair of goony, intergenerational protagonists at the center of this empty narrative.

Never-endingly desperate for more dope, Dr. Squires follows Luke around New York in a semi-horizontal haze while passing off his stepdaughter as a cure for his patient’s sex crisis. Drug dealers usually have no problem being popular or getting laid. Luke is the exception, and the reasons are obvious. For starters, he can scarcely form complete sentences. While Dr. Squires gives him step-by-step advice on how to get into his own stepdaughter’s pants, it’s also obvious why his long-suffering wife (Famke Janssen) eventually walks out. (As though in unison, the audience asks the same question: What took her so long?) Meanwhile, Luke engages Dr. Squires as his partner, as they sell their illegal wares from an Italian ice cream wagon. If nothing else, The Wackness will make you think twice the next time you see the Good Humor Man. Dr. Squires takes his miserable wife away for an outing while her daughter takes Luke to Fire Island for some awkward, mentally challenged mattress maneuvers, but nothing ever happens. What you get is dull, colorless characters played by uninteresting actors who shrug and mutter “whatever” when an issue is raised. You also get sophomoric, self-conscious dialogue and gimmicky, speeded-up camerawork that signifies the kind of self-indulgent filmmaking that usually premieres at Sundance and always successfully manages to camouflage all attempts at any deeper “meaning.” The girl gets bored. Dr. Squires’ wife dumps him. Luke’s father loses all of his family money and moves Luke to New Jersey, where, I assume, he grows up to direct The Wackness. Like the new breed of 20-somethings with no story to tell and no idea how to tell it if they had one, Jonathan Levine is clueless, and The Wackness goes nowhere fast. It just hangs.

rreed@observer.com

Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness, from his own screenplay, takes place in New York during the summer of 1994, when the newly inaugurated mayor, Rudy Giuliani, was beginning his now notorious crackdown on all sorts of petty crimes and even mere nuisances. His name is taken in vain several times during the course of the narrative, as if he and he alone were responsible for taking all the fun out of the Lindsay/Dinkins Fun City. Still, “fun” is spelled for the most part as D-O-P-E to the musical accompaniment of the hip-hop rants of the period. Luke Shapiro (Josh Peck), the film’s high-school graduate protagonist, sells bags of marijuana from a mobile two-wheel cart advertising “Fresh & Delicious Ices,” and is never caught by Mayor Giuliani’s goonish gendarmes while he makes all his sales. But he and his shrink are arrested and briefly jailed for writing on store windows. Quelle ironie, n’est-ce pas?

The movie itself is often photographed in what seems like a hallucinogenic haze—where is Hunter Thompson now that I really need him? In a litany of failed relationships and bonding between losers, Ben Kingsley plays Luke’s drug-addled shrink, Dr. Squires. Dr. Squires treats Luke in exchange for a steady supply of marijuana. When Luke declares that he has a crush on the shrink’s luscious, way-out-of-Luke’s-league stepdaughter, Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby), Dr. Squires advises Luke to forget about her, not because she is too good for him, but because if Stephanie does show any interest in Luke, it is only because she is bored and needs some temporary summer diversion. Luke ignores his shrink’s advice and plunges into his pursuit of Stephanie with ultimately heartbreaking results.

Meanwhile, Dr. Squires is going through the last days of a failed marriage to a much younger wife (Famke Janssen), who has become tired of the shrink’s moodiness. Indeed, the fear of boredom stalks the landscape like a monstrous apparition, and all the marijuana in the world doesn’t seem to help avoid it.

One day, Luke arrives home to find his mother (Talia Balsam) and his father (David Wohl) being evicted from their Manhattan apartment and forced to relocate to the New Jersey home of his grandparents (Bob Dishy, Joanna Merlin). Unsurprisingly, Luke hates New Jersey, as he tells us repeatedly.

Fortunately, the money to pay his forthcoming college tuition is not cast into doubt because he has made a small fortune selling marijuana. This, and much else, I found a little hard to believe, but a remarkable cast supplies subtlety and balance to the mostly downward spiral of the narrative. Ms. Thirlby, particularly, seems to be a rising star with talent, after holding her own in a usually routing role as loyal girlfriend to Ellen Page’s Juno. In The Wackness she builds on that favorable first impression with a brilliant rendering of a much more perverse and potentially unsympathetic part. The rest of the cast is hardly chopped liver, either, as it somehow transports the narrative through the treacherous slough of despondency to a more hopeful destination for its unheroic protagonist.

asarris@observer.com