20 Hollywood remakes nobody wanted

Somewhere along the line, the term “remake” became a thing of the past, felled by their reputations as critical and commercial kryptonite. Instead old classics exhumed by largely inferior talent for largely opportunistic reasons became “reboots” or “reimaginings.” “No!” Tim Burton exclaimed, “my Planet of the Apes isn’t a remake, it’s a re-imagining!”

But the specifics have remained the same: replicated plots and set pieces, occasional cameos from stars of the original film, but a result that is somehow shallower and cheaper – like a photocopier running out of ink. A recent spin has been the “gender-swap” reboot, wherein old properties are remade with all-female casts, or casting changes that minimise some of the more problematic elements of their predecessors.

But based on the critical vitriol levelled at the likes of Ocean’s 8 and this month's Overboard, an unwanted remake of the classic Kurt Russell/Goldie Hawn romcom, they can’t disguise the inevitable problems built into the foundations of movie remakes.

Some do admittedly work or even improve on their originals, from the political relevance of the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers to the iconic Al Pacino Scarface.

But for every Dawn of the Dead or Cape Fear, there are at least a dozen remakes that leave your mouth hanging open in horror that anybody thought such an endeavour was a good idea in the first place.

Here are 20 high-profile remakes that quite literally no one asked for, but somehow exist anyway.

1. Alfie (2004)

Released at the peak of Jude Law and Sienna Miller overexposure, this remake of the Michael Caine classic largely avoids the social relevance of its predecessor and struggles to justify its existence anywhere else. Law is charming and ably supported by a cast of interesting leading ladies (among them Marisa Tomei, Nia Long and Jane Krakowski), but it’s shallow stuff, designed to make Law a major movie star despite him usually working far better when on the sidelines.

2. Arthur (2011)

A grim attempt to take Russell Brand, then an up-and-coming US movie star better in small doses, and turn him into a 21st century Jim Carrey, the 2011 Arthur remake was a profoundly irritating comedy that today, with Brand existing as a political activist and advocate for drug policy reform, comes off like the product of an entirely different universe. Also featuring Greta Gerwig in her “bland studio filmmaking” phase a few years before Lady Bird, Arthur made it more obvious than most how striking, proudly idiosyncratic talents can be neutered beyond recognition by the studio system.

3. Carrie (2013)

Brian De Palma’s Carrie is a classic on its own, but is largely so effective because of its leading lady, Sissy Spacek providing an alien gawkiness and inherent peculiarity that makes her titular heroine both endearing and terrifying. So who to cast for the unnecessary 2013 remake? Why, of course, the pouty, conventionally-beautiful Chloe Moretz, whose biggest social inadequacy is that she’s… kind of short, maybe? She’s one of Carrie 2.0’s most glaring missteps, along with the frustrating squandering of director Kimberly Peirce. Despite so beautifully nailing the tragedy of teenage isolation and existing on the fringes in her debut film Boys Don’t Cry, she seems unusually hemmed in here.

4. Get Carter (2000)

The first in a wave of non-starter Michael Caine remakes from the early Noughties, Stephen Kay’s Get Carter has style for days, in a new-millennium, everything-looks-like-John-Woo kind of way, but transplanting the action to modern Seattle robs the film of much of its predecessor’s gritty charm. Sylvester Stallone, your obvious choice for a Caine successor, is the former mob enforcer spiralling into the criminal underworld while investigating his brother’s murder. He’s backed up by an enjoyably oddball cast (including Miranda Richardson, Alan Cumming, Mickey Rourke and Caine himself), but the film can’t escape its inherent pointlessness.

5. Gloria (1999)

One of the numerous films to pair Gena Rowlands and her filmmaker husband John Cassavetes, the original Gloria is all grimy New York, arch dialogue and Rowlands at her tough-at-nails best as a gangster’s moll turned surrogate mother to an orphaned youngster. The little-seen, little-necessary Nineties remake dulls the original film’s edge considerably, with a self-conscious, miscast Sharon Stone as the titular heroine. It marked the last starring role for Stone during her Nineties heyday, and only confirmed how often Hollywood struggled to know what to do with her.

6. Halloween (2007)

Credit where credit’s due, at least Rob Zombie tried something different with his 2007 remake of the genre-defining John Carpenter slasher. But the grungy, carnival-ride ickiness of Zombie’s backwoods aesthetic makes this a generally unpleasant watch, with an uncomfortable interest in sexual violence and graphic blood-shedding. It takes everything subtle and disquieting about Carpenter’s original, covers it in rotten teeth and animal parts and is all the worse for it.

7. The Karate Kid (2010)

A drab vanity project for Will Smith’s son Jaden, this 2010 remake transplanted the plot of the original film to China, with Smith as a bullied pre-teen taught martial arts by Jackie Chan while living overseas. The pair have decent chemistry but, mirroring the remakes of Footloose and Fame, the film itself lacks the gleefully corny kitsch that could never be replicated outside of the Eighties. The title is also a case of false advertising: Smith gets trained in kung fu, with karate getting nary a mention. The nerve!

8. The Ladykillers (2004)

Quite remarkable in how badly it went awry, this Coen Brothers remake of the Ealing classic appeared on paper to have everything going for it, but ends up being a distant, uncertain piece of work. Tom Hanks is very good as the flamboyant Texan leading a gang of criminals to rob a casino, and Irma P Hall is equally enjoyable as the elderly woman unexpectedly getting in their way, but despite the pitch-black humour of its source material, this Ladykillers is an oddly toothless ride. There’s a reason few remember it.

9. Planet of the Apes (2001)

Very much of its time, Tim Burton’s anonymous Planet of the Apes remake is the exact kind of nonsensical, unusually shoddy action picture that defined much of the new-millennium in Hollywood. Tim Roth and Helena Bonham Carter are among the great actors buried under admittedly decent prosthetics, but there’s such a rhythmless, disorganised quality to the sets, the narrative and the acting (the film reportedly began shooting without a finished script) that much of their work goes to waste. And the film’s closing image, reimagining the iconic twist of the original, is more comedic than scary.

10. Point Break (2015)

Point Break works for three reasons: the boundless high-octane enthusiasm of director Kathryn Bigelow, the unintentional hilarity of Keanu Reeves as a maverick undercover fed and the zen magnetism of Patrick Swayze, in arguably his greatest role. It results in a film built on a majestic goofiness, but so confident in its swagger that it’s an undeniable action classic. Remove all of that, and you have very little, as proven by the toothless 2015 remake, which replaced Reeves with Luke Bracey, think a poor man’s Jai Courtney (if you even can), and Swayze with an anonymous Edgar Ramirez. Mercifully for all of us, it bombed spectacularly at the box office.

11. Poseidon (2006)

Filled with mid-Noughties actors that Hollywood subsequently realised weren’t quite the next big things they thought they were (Josh Lucas! Mike Vogel! Jacinda Barrett!), this loose remake of the original, far starrier Poseidon Adventure features Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas being swept away by an enormous wave, but little else of note. A colossal bomb at the summer box office in 2006, it wisely turned Hollywood off reviving the star-studded disaster movie genre.

12. Psycho (1998)

Gus Van Sant’s infamous shot-for-shot remake of Psycho is so unusual in its pointlessness that it almost exists as a pseudo art film. As director, he emphasises the queer subtext only gently nodded to by Hitchcock, but also offended Norman Bates aficionados by explicitly making his titular killer sexually aroused by his crimes rather than ambiguously asexual. Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche make for offbeat, occasionally effective successors to Anthony Perkins and Janet Leigh, but the film is almost parodic in its lack of purpose.

13. RoboCop (2014)

Like the Total Recall remake two years prior, this RoboCop reboot shaves everything remotely spiky and subversive about the classic Paul Verhoeven original, but also didn’t have Kate Beckinsale using her crotch as a battering ram against Colin Farrell to ludicrously justify its existence. And with its faultless CGI and anodyne sheen, it somehow manages to look like every other dystopian sci-fi epic released today. Despite two major misses in recent years, Hollywood doesn’t appear to have learnt their lesson when it comes to reanimating the Verhoeven oeuvre – a Starship Troopers remake is currently in the works.

14. Rollerball (2001)

Cut to pieces by its distributor for apparently being “too Asian” and featuring a central performance from American Pie’s Chris Klein that immediately torpedoed his leading man career, John McTiernan’s Rollerball remake eschewed the anti-capitalist, anti-corporation undertones of the 1975 original and instead filled it with indecipherable action, LL Cool J and gratuitous nudity. McTiernan ended the decade being sentenced to jail, apparently for perjury and wiretapping, but somehow not for crimes against cinema.

15. The Stepford Wives (2004)

One of those infamously nightmarish productions where every bit of behind-the-scenes conflict can be glimpsed on-screen, the 2004 Stepford Wives remake traded the sinister slow-burn of the Seventies original for goofy, scenery-chewing slapstick. Nicole Kidman, in her notorious mid-Noughties career drought, is the Manhattan TV exec shipped off to a picture-perfect suburbia filled with synthetic robot women following a nervous breakdown. Bette Midler is there to further increase the showboating, while the film’s riffs on Temptation Island and Roger Bart’s performance as a walking gay minstrel show somehow make it even more dated than its predecessor.

16. Straw Dogs (2011)

Like it or not, Sam Peckinpah’s 1971 Straw Dogs is a unique experience – transgressive and nihilistic, with a deep-seated misogyny that makes it an ugly, unsettling watch on numerous levels. But it’s also why a modern remake, filled with glamorous movie stars and sapped of much of its Seventies sadism, is so shrug-worthy. James Marsden is a decent if unlikely replacement for Dustin Hoffman, but the film’s more commercial, glossy ambitions are clear to all. Either go big or go home.

17. Taxi (2004)

Coming off like something made for and by 12-year-old boys, this garish and unfunny remake of the French action thriller, directed with characteristic lack-of-flair by Fantastic Four’s Tim Story, stars Queen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon as a mismatched pair of New Yorkers, one a taxi driver and the other a cop, investigating a series of robberies committed by a gang of criminal supermodels led by Gisele Bundchen. A year after Bringing Down the House, Latifah is once again playing loud second-fiddle to a meek white comic, and a perplexing, charmless Fallon proves why his movie career never took off.

18. The Vanishing (1993)

The original Dutch version of The Vanishing, about a man obsessively hunting for his missing girlfriend, is one of the most disturbing movies ever made – a subtly terrifying thriller that is uncompromising and delicately-paced and builds to a chilling closer that gets under your skin and then refuses to leave. The American version of The Vanishing, released in 1993 and starring Jeff Bridges, Kiefer Sutherland and a pre-fame Sandra Bullock, shirks all of the original’s power in exchange for comfortable Hollywood gloss and a generic happy ending. It’s the epitome of toothless American remakes of foreign classics, and the reason every US reboot of an international film is met with immediate suspicion today.

19. The Wicker Man (2006)

Now justifiably regarded as a cult classic, Neil LaBute’s The Wicker Man isn’t much more than a collection of funny GIFs loosely connected by a plot, but it’s so impressively uninterested in the sinister pagan grisliness of its predecessor that it’s almost worth seeing. And Nicolas Cage, in many ways, is at his very best here: otherworldly, completely missing the point and quite unlike anybody else.

20. The Women (2008)

Sitcom writer Diane English spent 15 years attempting to bring her remake of the star-studded high-society comedy The Women to the big screen, with Julia Roberts, Sandra Bullock, Uma Thurman, Meg Ryan, Whitney Houston and a host of other A-list women falling in and out of involvement. In the end, the only star to stick with the project from its inception to its eventual release in 2008 was Ryan, here saddled with horrifying poodle hair, and a supporting cast (including Annette Bening and a cameoing Carrie Fisher) far too good for this sort of thing. That English managed to turn something so smart, biting and energetic into an unfunny slog is almost impressive.