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Let's Count Down … Hannah's Best And Worst Of Movie Remakes

Remakes have always been a bit of a sticking point for me, and a wonderful maypole of debate around which people on the internet can dance for days, correcting the grammar of other posters with razor-sharp disdain and calling people “n00bs” for liking Gore Verbinski’s version of The Ring. While I can see both sides of the debate, I have a painful and embarrassing nerve reflex that causes me to facepalm violently whenever I find out that a great film (usually foreign or low-budget) is going to be remade (usually by big studios with equally huge amounts of money and indifference). Soon we’ll see remakes of Chan Wook-Parks’s Oldboy is actually a decent film, but that’s purely because it’s almost a shot-for-shot, word-for-word remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic. When Van Sant was asked why he had even bothered, he simply replied with the wild, impassioned reason of, “So no one else would have to.” Yes, even the director openly admitted that the film was pointless. To make matters worse, the role of Norman Bates (once played with chilling finesse by Anthony Perkins) was given to Vince Vaughn. Vaughn can be a great comedy actor, not to mention the fact that he’s extremely will be enough to wash the taste of Tim Burton’s “reimagining” of monkey dystopia out of our mouths. Warning bells started going off when it was revealed that the shoes of Charlton Heston would be filled by Mark Whalberg AKA Marky Mark of Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. The final product lacked even the trademark weirdness of Burton’s usual fare, and was instead an uninspired and conservative summer blockbuster. Another film that probably would have got better reviews if people hadn’t already seen how good it could have been, the best that can be said for this remake is that the ape make-up was quite good.