Along with Wes Craven (Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes) and John Carpenter (Halloween, The Fog), George Romero has become a major go-to source for potential horror film remakes. His seminal Night of the Living Dead has gotten several reboots, and Zack Snyder's take on Dawn of the Dead converted many a defiant fright fan over to the notion of updating supposedly classic creepshows. Now we have a redux of Romero's post-Watergate action thriller The Crazies. But instead of focusing on government ineptitude and a timely "trust no one" message, Breck Eisner's take is all tone and atmosphere, with very little dread to go around. It all begins when a local drunk goes nutzoid at a high school baseball game. Sheriff David Dutton (Timothy Olyphant) is forced to kill him, sending the entire town into shock. A mere 24 hours later, everyone in Ogden Marsh is coming unglued. Fathers are setting their families on fire. Morticians are sewing up the eyes and mouths of the living. Dutton's doctor wife Judy (Radha Mitchell) figures it's some kind of virus. After discovering a downed military plane in the water supply just outside the town, Dutton and his deputy Russell Clank (Joe Anderson) believe it's some kind of biological weapon. When the army shows up in gas masks and hazmat suits, their worst fears are confirmed. As they try to find a way out of the now quarantined area, they hit upon an even more unsettling truth. No one is supposed to make it out alive -- not the crazy, and definitely not the sane. It's a shame when your title terror makes the merest of cameo appearances in your proposed epic scarefest, but that's exactly what happens in this update of The Crazies. Instead of focusing on the unhinged locales and their craven atrocities, or the inept military and their bumbling, bloody cover-up, the movie micromanages the narrative down to three people and their 90 minute story of attempted escape. Instead of a perilous pandemic of splatter-strewn proportions, we get a tiny group of characters moving from point A to point B, and the various unnecessary people they pick up/lose along the way. For this to work, you have to create really strong central characters or a wildly intriguing premise. The Crazies does neither, and because of that, everything here underwhelms. There is no scope or sense of impending danger. Eisner fails to find anything inventive in the "rage plague" concept -- unlike Danny Boyle, who really delivered the goods with his great 28 Days Later -- and keeps the Pentagon as a vague, ambiguous threat. By the time the Duttons and Clank start turning on each other, we've given up on seeing anything remotely new or novel. Instead, the finale lurches in and provides the mandatory horror movie moments -- false scares, unstoppable villains, and a last act gasp for survival. Pacing is also a big problem here. Eisner spends so much time with the set-up that he can't seem to concentrate on delivering the shivers. Instead, we get wasted shots of landscapes on fire, pensive sequences where our tired cast walks the vast open plains of Iowa in shell-shocked disinterest. Where's the drama? Where's the terror? Hell -- where's the blood? In a movie where an entire town turns murderous, you'd expect a little arterial spray. Sadly, this version of The Crazies keeps the vein volume well in check. For his part, George Romero believed he was making a more realistic variation on his previous end-of-the-world zombiethon. In this case, the updated Crazies has more than enough mood. What it lacks, however, is menace.