Took me damn long enough to get around to this.  I meant to have a review done soon after its theatrical release, but whatever the case, I feel this is the more appropriate time to review this film.  Why?  Because enough time has passed for me to be able to view this film as what it truly is - a major disappointment.  I really loved the film when it first came out.  I saw it three times on opening weekend, but now, I haven't watched it much at all since hitting DVD.  The hype is dead and buried, the anticipation is a vague memory.  What I see and know now is that Freddy vs. Jason was a monument of missed opportunities due to a poor script "clean up" by David Goyer and the over-the-top comic book stylings of director Ronny Yu.  This film was barely what it should have been, and did not portray Jason to his fullest potential.  The brief synopsis is as follows:

Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) is in hell, and can't get out.  Everyone has forgotten about him, he has no power over anyone in the dream world.  He's searched throughout hell for someone that could help him reignite people's fear of Freddy, and he has in Jason Voorhees (Ken Kirzinger).  Freddy, posing as Jason's mother Pamela Voorhees (Paula Shaw), manipulates Jason into reawakening and doing Freddy's dirty work for a time.  Jason goes to Elm Street in Springwood, Ohio to lay the seeds of fear that will re-empower Freddy, but when Jason becomes uncontrollable and continues to take Freddy's thunder and victims - the two immediately come at odds and the battle for 80s horror icon supremacy begins.

To be plainly straight forward, Ronny Yu does nothing with this film to make it remotely resemble anything horror-related.  Yeah, we've got monsters and gore and murder, but he doesn't even try to make anything scary.  He just turns this entire concept into a comic book adventure with larger than life action like a Michael Bay film.  It's all ridiculously overblown action with absolutely no attempt at building tension or suspense.  Ronny Yu doesn't care to take these characters back to their truly horror-driven roots.  In fact, he demonstrates very little to zero knowledge of the characters at all.  Ken Kirzinger's performance is forced by Yu to be a slow lumbering Frankenstein's Monster at times, and then, as an animalistic rageful killer.  Kirzinger does the best he can, but Yu forced him into a very specific portrayal of Jason that does not display him at his best.  Ken was Kane Hodder's stunt double in Friday The 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan, and so, he knows how to do Jason justice (even if it is Kane Hodder's version). Ronny Yu simply knew nothing about the best aspects of Jason's character, about what worked best in previous interpretations - let alone display Jason's creative diversity with different weapons. 

Englund, on the other hand, is allowed to put in possibly he best performance as Freddy Krueger since the original A Nightmare On Elm Street.  Freddy is sick, sadistic, and just totally vile here.  Though, the wisecracks and one-liners still do pop up to form some cringeable moments. It seems as if the lame humor aspects of the character will never die, but compared to the portrayal in Freddy's Dead - this is evil incarnate.   When Englund's in the moment of the most terrible acts, he delivers something we've hungered for for way too long - pure, serious villiany.  Freddy may have been given only one kill in this film, but it truly is memorable.  The entire sequence is vintage Elm Street.  The slur in Krueger's voice is new, but it also adds a touch of sickening evil.  Overall, Freddy is given a far better treatment here than Jason.  I believe that's mainly because New Line is still the 'House That Freddy Built,' and he's their icon.  There's nobody on board this production that was just as devoted to Jason as others were to Freddy.  I hear you screaming Kane Hodder's name coupled with cries of "robbed," but I really don't care.

The weakness of this film lies with Ronny Yu and the script.  Shannon & Swift reportedly had a lot more Jason-centric elements in the story, but David Goyer came in, eleiminated many good things about it, cheesed up the dialogue, and ultimately made it a worse script overall.  When I saw Blade: Trinity, I saw how bad Goyer's scripwriting can be when there's no one to fine-tune it.  The guy isn't as great of a scriptwriter as we've been led to believe.  The level of cheesy, horribly poor dialogue is out-right obscene!  Makes me cringe to sit through it.  Still, a really good actor can make bad dialogue workable, even tolerable, but the cast we have here is a long way off from winning any awards beyond a Razzie.  Jason Ritter is stiff, boring, and shallow.  Monica Keena has a very ample upper body that's used to laughable ends, but she displays no decent acting skills whatsoever.  And don't get me start on Kelly Rowland - terrible, horrible, a pure crime against cinema.  It's acting like this that makes great and proud B-movie actors like Bruce Campbell or Jeffrey Combs ashamed to be associated with the genre.  Though, there are some good efforts here, but unfortunately, they're gone all too early.  These performances come from Brendan Fletcher as "Mark Davis" and Zack Ward as Mark's long-dead brother "Bobby Davis."  Freddy uses Bobby to haunt and torture Mark to creepy effect, and Ward does a fine job mimicking Englund's mannerisms.  Fletcher does very well despite having the burden of tackling most of the exposition in the film.  His character is smarter than all the other teenagers combined, and a lot more talented.  Too bad he's disposed of once all his exposition dialogue has been delivered. Lochlyn Munro clocks in as "Officer Stubbs," and while his character seems to have some bit of potential (at least in story development), it's dashed halfway through the film when he's made into another statistic on the body count list. That's the failing of the characters in this film - if you have exposition dialogue in this film, you're going to die right after you've served that purpose. If you have nothing at all to contribute to the film in character, story, or acting talent, you'll survive to the final act.

The effects in this movie are decent, but there's way too much CGI here.  Visual effects have always been a major element in the Nightmare films, but this is more than enough and too cheesy.  The volume of blood here makes everything very silly, and hardly scary.  Also, the fact that Freddy has always had green blood in all previous film entries, and he now has regular red blood shows how little anyone cared for continuity.  Plus, Jason is undead - he has no blood pumping through his veins, yet it all spurts out like geyers.  Ever since undead Jason debuted in Jason Lives, his blood has been a black, gooey substance that oozes out of his wounds (at least, when he did bleed).  The design of Jason is different, and while I like the hockey mask, it becomes too battered by the end ruining the visualization of Jason's moral blankness that it's meant to symbolize.  The raggedy clothing he's draped in makes him look like a homeless derelict.  Why they couldn't stick with the coveralls or the classic green shirt and tan khakis is beyond me.  He really does look like Frankenstein's Monster in this film (minus the neck bolts).

Also, the level of comedy here is just wrong.  Even when Freddy is beating down on Jason in the dream world boiler room, it's all done comically.  Jason's just hurled around like in a pinball machine (complete with sound effects and wisecracks).  I just hate that they couldn't keep Freddy as a sick, detestable bastard, but instead were so tempted to make a wisecracking "fun" villian.  Freddy Krueger is setup from the very first moment of this movie as a child killer (possibly something even more sickening), but not long after, he's being played up as a jokey villian.  This doesn't jive with me.  Certainly, nothing should be taken too seriously with a film that pits a wisecracking dream demon against an undead killer wearing a hockey mask, but there's certain character traits that should be weighed in when dealing with the character overall.  As a human being, Freddy Krueger kidnapped, violated, and killed children - not a laughing matter at all.  Though, if anyone had made any attempt to make the teenage characters in this film any bit real, let alone sympathetic, Freddy would seem more villianous by attempting to kill them all.

Finally, the score by Graeme Revell is poor.  Sounds like he composed the thing during a ten minute coffee break in between films.  The same weak musical cues are used a dozen times over, and no real thoughtout themes exist here.  There was only one Jason "vocal effect" produced for the film, and any Elm Street themes that appear were injected in the aftermath of Revell's scoring.  Knowing that Revell did the amazing and very gothic score for The Crow made me hopeful that he'd deliver something equally as epic, but sadly he phones this work in.  I would've preferred someone along the lines of Christopher Young scoring this as he did amazing work on the first two Hellraiser films and subsequent motion picture scores.  But whatever I had hoped for, this score is the most disappointing of either series - Revell wasn't even trying here.

The only good part of the film is the end.  When Freddy & Jason finally battle in the real world, but I'm only speaking of when they get hands-on.  When the two are chopping and tearing away at each other - ripping chunks of flesh from their bodies - does it get really damn good.  Everything previous to that is either a ridiculous WWE style brawl with flying elbows and such, or Freddy hurling heavy objects at Jason.  The real meat of the entire encounter is Freddy & Jason just dropping the bullshit creativity, and just ripping each other apart!  This doesn't last long enough though, and it takes a third party to really allow for a winner of any kind to prevail (despite no one winning at all).

As for missed opportunities?  Returning characters, anyone?  More Crystal Lake?  More creative kills and weapons for Jason, or even more than one kill for Freddy?  Also, so many directors were attached to this film for years, and Ronny Yu is the one they choose?  Some guy who had no knowledge of either franchise, either character, and no talent for crafting a real horror film?  And New Line works on producing this movie for a decade, and this is the best script anyone could produce?  Sounds extremely sad and pathetic that all this work and money produced something so painfully short of its potential.  There must've been a LONG list of directors that could've pulled this off better, and actually would've done the movie.  I could go on and on for days about the shortcomings of this film, and what could've made it exponentially better, but I haven't the time to do so.  Overall, this movie was a gimmick, plain and simple.  It wasn't about being faithful to the characters, fans, continuity, or franchises.  It wasn't about good acting, directing, scoring, or scriptwriting either.  So, after years of being able to put the hype and anticipation of this film behind me, and look at it realistically, I leave it with the ultimate score of 3.5 out of 10.