12 Perfect Horror Movies With One Glaring Flaw
7. Ring - The Bland Protagonist
Ring is a dread-laced, terrifyingly atmospheric and beautifully plotted horror masterpiece, and a strong contender for the best J-Horror film ever, but alas, much like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Alien, it's got a bit of a character problem.
More specifically, it's got a not-terribly-interesting protagonist, Reiko Asakawa (Nanako Matsushima), a journalist who tries to save herself from a curse surrounding a mysterious video tape.
Although Matsushima is very good in the part, Reiko is a pretty dull and emotionless lead who is often inactive in the story and has nothing in the way of an arc. It's actually her ex-husband Ryuji (Hiroyuki Sanada, who's enjoyed a fruitful career in Hollywood and has appeared in many recent movies such as Bullet Train, Army of the Dead and Avengers: Endgame) who is the more interesting and active character in the movie.
Strangely enough, the inferior American remake provided a far better version of the character (played by the great Naomi Watts). Reiko certainly doesn't sink the film, but given how great most of Ring's other elements are, the deficiencies within its focal character are undeniably distracting. Still, she improved in the film's 1999 sequel, Ring 2.