“The Grudge” may have started in Japan with the horror film “Ju-on,” but after four installments, 16 years, and a villain that cannot die as long as there’s an ounce left of box-office potential in its intellectual property, it’s become a quintessentially American franchise.
Unfortunately, the intriguingly different — and, perhaps vitally, unspecific — set of cultural myths that drove Takashi Shimizu’s 2004 remake of his earlier work to more than $187 million at the box office has not only long since fallen out of commercial vogue, but also seemingly exhausted its own mysteries.
Even gussied up with a cast of prestigious character actors including Andrea Riseborough, Demián Bichir, John Cho, Betty Gilpin and Jacki Weaver, this new “Grudge” does little more than revive the visual lexicon of its predecessors without adding new mythic, narrative or emotional dimensions to the ongoing story of an unseen force that forever passes along its unstoppable evil.