Movies That Didn't Need to Be Remade

Well, Aphrodite wanted to see the remake of Conan the Barbarian. She's seen the first one more times than I can count (having caught it every day for a couple of weeks at a dollar theater back in Austin when it first came out) and the leading man appeared to be sufficiently hunky to make it worthwhile. The Bug was in agreement on this latter component, so we decided to allow her to see her first 'R-Rated' movie.

Since a quick look at the box office returns made it clear that this would be the last weekend that we'd be able to catch it, we saw it at the over-priced theater in the mall. It was the only place that was showing the movie in 2D and none of us have any interest in wearing silly glasses. The one good thing about the mall 26-plex was that it was also showing Spy Kids 4, in 2D, at the same time, which allowed Little Buddy to catch a movie, too. Tragically, he got the better end of the deal.

To say that it was dreadful is unfair. It was worse than that. Not only was the original far better, but even Conan the Destroyer, which was a wretched piece of crap, was better. You've seen the plot before. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was pretty much the same plot, done better. The dialogue was written by someone with a tin ear. The heavies had bombastic lines, the good guys popped out with strangely disconnected bits, and the leads seem to have picked up scripts for different movies.

Most of the acting was genuinely dreadful. Stephen Lang did a nice job as the villain, at least until the very end, when the plot completely came apart, and the actor who played Conan as a child was a much better actor than the adult version, which may explain why he had so few lines. It certainly wouldn't have looked good if Conan had been articulate and charismatic as a boy, only to lapse into grunting sullenness as a man.

None of the characters were more than a cardboard cutout and the movie completely lacked the humor and joie de vivre that made the first movie worth watching. I managed to hold it together through the movie, but burst out into loud laughter during the credits, simply because of the pompousness of it all.

One bright point was that Rachel Nichols was definitely prettier than Sandahl Bergman and a better actress. The downside was that, as Aphrodite pointed out, she went from being a monk of a peaceful order to a killing machine with very few qualms and with remarkable efficiency.

Standing in the lobby before the movie, I noticed the posters for several additional movies that didn't need to be remade:

The Three Musketeers — IMDB lists twenty-four live-action movie versions, dating back as far as 1903 and coming from countries as diverse as Argentina and Iran. For anyone born in the latter half of the last century, the definitive version was done in 1973. The cast included Oliver Reed, Faye Dunaway, Richard Chamberlain, Raquel Welch, Michael York, Geraldine Chaplin, Christopher Lee, Sybil Danning, Spike Milligan, and (in the only role that I've ever liked him in) Charlton Heston. What does the new version have to offer? M'lady is Milla Jovovich, which is an inspired choice, although I don't see her as deliciously evil as Faye Dunaway. Buckingham, who is definitely not a lead, is played by Orlando Bloom, which should attract the sighing female audience. D'Artagan is the kid who played Percy Jackson, and is no Michael York, in any way. You've never heard of any of the actors playing Athos, Porthos, and Aramis. The one casting that seems truly promising is Christoph Waltz as Cardinal Richelieu.

Fright Night — I never saw the original, but really, is there that much of a need to revisit yet another low-budget horror movie?

Footloose — The world survived for 3.87 billion years before the arrival of the first version of Footloose. Couldn't we have waited as long for the remake?

The Thing — There was a trailer for The Thing. This movie holds a special spot in my heart, as the John Carpenter/Kurt Russell version came out in 1982, which was the year that I spent in Antarctica. We had a copy of the movie down there and watched it repeatedly. It gets the feel of one of the small bases pretty well. Frankly, it's a decent flick and I don't see why it needs to be remade. Without putting too fine of a point on things, I would definitely have preferred to have spent the year with Mary Elizabeth Winstead, rather than with Kurt Russell, but that's just me.

A couple that we didn't see this time, but I've seen trailers or teasers for:

The Mechanic — The original movie was fine. Not art, but fine. The pacing was good, the plot was decent. Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent both did a nice job, and it featured a Questar telescope. What could be better?

Red Dawn — For those of you who might have been busy in 1984 (or not around for some reason), the original Red Dawn had a group of teenagers fighting a Soviet invasion of the United States. This invasion took place across Canada and into the Dakotas, because an invasion across thousands of miles of endless, empty steppes worked so well for Napoleon and Hitler. Uhhhh. When we saw it, back then, two rows in front of us were a cluster of idiots in camo gear. Someone must have seen them come in, because during the trailers, the lights came on and the manager demanded to see whether they were carrying guns. Which they were. Toy guns. The manager collected the hardware anyway and told them they could collect it after the movie. Needless to say, these guys got seriously into the movie, with one excitedly shouting, "This could really happen!" as the adults were rounded up. The new version has North Koreans invading. A million starving North Korean soldiers coming ashore in shipping containers would make for an interesting opening scene, but my suspicion is that they wouldn't last an hour in the Long Beach dock area before someone had mugged them and stolen all of their weapons.

I'll run through some of the past remakes in a later posting.