New subgenre I'll be looking out for: movies — especially remakes — that totally ignore the fundamental question of their premise.

To put that in non-jerk terms, say you've got a movie about hyperintelligent dinosaurs trying to alter the course of an incoming meteor by making all the pterodactyls fly up and smash themselves into it, but you never touch the topic of sacrificing the few for the needs of the many. Without that insight, you'll just be like every other cataclysmic space-dinosaur flick out there!

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

If you've got the chance to go for a little bit more, I say you've got to take your shot. That's my confusion for something like the remake of The Crazies, a movie that does its damnedest to duck the question of how you tell the difference between crazy-person violence and "normal" violence, but somehow ends up halfway decent anyway.

When an armed man strolls onto a baseball field and refuses to drop his gun, small-town sheriff Timothy Olyphant has no choice but to shoot him. Olyphant's certain the man was drunk, but his autopsy comes back clean.

As others go crazy, Olyphant tracks the source of their madness to a military plane crashed in the town's water supply, but it's too late. The army quarantines the whole town, separating Olyphant from wife Radha Mitchell — who may be infected herself.

And that's just for starters, really. Most infection/zombie-ish movies take their sweet time chronicling the breakdown of whatever town they're set in, largely because the heroes stubbornly ignore all the warning signs around them. Their inner monologues must sound something like "Hey, that guy was kind of crazy. Dum de dum...whoa now, that guy was really nuts. Wonder if there's any connection? Nah! Now let's all go for a dip in the crowded public pool. Hey, why is everybody suddenly acting all crazy?"

Not so with The Crazies. By the time any other infection movie is getting around to its first victim, Olyphant's whole town is in flames. Scott Kosar and Ray Wright's script hops from disaster to disaster with the urgency of a couple dudes who really, really want to see their characters die.

There's no real downtime here, unless you consider hiding out in a barn while slaughter-happy soldiers ferret you out to be a relaxing reprieve from fighting off pitchfork-wielding madmen.

This leads to a lot of tension, and director Breck Eisner keeps each individual scene tight, but after a while The Crazies starts to sag. Olyphant's pretty much got the whole mystery figured out about halfway in. After that, it becomes a wandering marathon of running, hiding, running, and more hiding. Nobody's got much of a plan, and Mitchell's underwritten explanation of the virus might as well be "There's these teeny-tiny bugs, see, and if they get inside you, they can make you sick!"

But who cares what she has to say. This isn't about reality, it's about people surviving events so deadly they'd kill a cockroach in +5 plate mail.

This is somewhat more vitriolic than I mean to be. The Crazies gets off to a strong start, and even after it loses its focus, it kept me sunk down in my seat because I knew it was going to make me jump and then everyone behind me would think I was a lace-wearing sissy. Too bad it gets a little less interesting about every 10 minutes it goes on.

Grade: B-