Red Dawn

A former Marine (Chris Hemsworth), his teenage brother (Josh Peck) and assorted friends (Josh Hutcherson, Adrianne Palicki, Isabel Lucas, Connor Cruise) take to the hills when North Korea invades the Pacific Northwest, and form a band of resistance guerillas calling themselves the Wolverines. If you can swallow the premise of this remake (back in 1984, the invaders were Russian, Cuban and Nicaraguan), it's a decent action flick. Writers Carl Ellsworth and Jeremy Passmore and director Dan Bradley soft-pedal the right-wing politics (it's just as easy to spin the story in the opposite direction as a parable for Iraqi insurgents or Afghan resistance against the Soviets) in favor of blood-and-thunder urban warfare. Performances are sketchy but competent, action scenes are swift-paced and efficiently brutal.