M. Night Shyamalan’s After
Earth represents the latest in the line of underperforming “sure fire
Blockbuster” movies that audiences have rejected. Every year there are a handful
of films that are hyped, and for good reason. Great concept, based on existing
material, or starring an all star cast with a visionary director. These movies
do one of three things. The best of these movies hit on all cylinders, break
box office records, are acclaimed by fans and critics alike, and live on as
classics. The next best thing is to be a box office hit that is profitable even
if fans and critics aren’t that impressed. The worst scenario is to become Speed Racer, a panned piece of manure that
loses damn near 100 million dollars.
The Top Ten Films That Should Be Remade The Right Way
10) Fantastic Four: The first Fantastic Four did what it was
supposed to do, make money, but it came at a cost and Fox felt the scorn from
angry fanboys who refused to go support its sequel. This wasn’t supposed to be
bad movie, the cast was nearly perfect, and it was coming in the midst of the first
superhero movie boom. The storyline was jumbled and the directing choppy, but
if they were to reboot and get the family adventure tone of the Fantastic Four
comics across, it would be a smash.
9) Red Tails: George Lucas had been telling people since Willow that his next film was going to
be a take on the Tuskegee airman, less politics and more action, in order to
give African American’s some true heroes. What we finally got was a high-octane
trailer, a campaign in black communities to “support black history.” and an
actual movie that should have been shown on the Lifetime Movie Network. History
Channel makes better documentaries than this mess. The sad thing is that the
dog fighting sequences were great and the budget could have been used to lure
in good actors—not just Neyo using a bad southern accent.
8) Sucker Punch: I like Sucker Punch—a lot. But I’m still
going to put it on this list because there was no reason this couldn’t have
been the Kill Bill of fantasy action films. Zack Snyder is a top ten director
and his take of girl power masked under sexploitation, works on a many levels as is, but it’s held back by its rating. Warner Bros were afraid to death after
The Watchmen’s R rating didn’t repeat 300’s success, and what we got was steam
instead of blood, cartoon fight scenes, and schoolyard friendly lap dances.
7) Terminator Salvation: Damn was Christian Bale
underutilized. The trailer for this film gave me goose bumps, and then it
leaked that Arnold’s image from the 1980’s would be used to reprise the role of
the T-800! Take my money!!! Then I saw the movie, which wasn’t as bad as Terminator
3, but is on this list because it blew a chance to do something really special.
After years of talking about the Skynet war we were finally in the future, and
it was wack! Please John Conner send someone back in time to redo this crap.
6) Jennifer’s Body: Before you dismiss this as a bad idea
from the outset, you have to remember what this was being hyped as before we
actually saw it. Diablo Cody was coming off an Oscar win for writing Juno and was being touted as the female
Kevin Smith. Her next script was described as a horror high school revenge tale,
unlike anything we’ve ever seen. I couldn’t wait to see her take on this, then
Megan Fox was cast… and the witty Diablo Cody dialogue became more Tromaville
than View Askew.
4) Green Lantern: Sigh... they should have known better
since it was made post Dark Knight. WB knew what comic fans loved, yet they
were determined to take a crap in our face and revert us back to Batman Forever
type camp. Ryan Reynolds never had a chance with Hal Jordan being molded into a
poor man’s Peter Parker. How about next time we skip the origin, assume people
aren’t idiots, and give us a Green Lantern tale that takes place after he’s
been established as a hero and is burnt out and cynical.
3) The Matrix Reloaded & Revolutions : I give the Star
Wars prequel Trilogy kudos for getting it almost right with Episode 3… the same
can’t be said for The Matrix. What was supposed to be our generation’s Star Wars
transformed from cool sci-fi Kung Fu epic, into some Neo as Jesus religious
metaphorical crap. The Matrix trilogy lost its sense of humor and sense of
adventure in an attempt to become something deeper. I imagine that someone will
try to do to the matrix what Bryan Singer tried to do for Superman, keep the
movie we all loved, and pretend the last two never happened. …whoa.
2) Street Fighter: I’m going to focus on the Jean Claude Van
Damme version, not the Chun Li one that you’ve probably seen on sale for $3.99 in
the Wal-Mart discount bin. Van Damme as Guile wasn’t the biggest problem, the
biggest problem was that whoever produced this movie had never played Street
Fighter II. Look, Capcom game designers aren’t the best story tellers, and SF’s
endings range from the bizarre (Zangief dancing) to the lazy (Ryu wanting
another challenge), but with a budget this big you could have hired Shane Black
to give it a realistic story or just jacked a storyline from an acclaimed Hong
Kong martial arts flick. Give us another quarter and let’s start this game
over.
1) Transformers: The movie world of Bayformers gets a lot of
things right... I’m not going to pile on it as if Michael Bay is making Tyler
Perry type films. The action sequences are awesome, the actors are generally
good, but the biggest problem with all three Transformers films is that it
sacrifices the epic scope of Autobots versus Deceptacons and shifts the focus
on Sam as a man on the run. If you want to do Cloverfield with Giant Robots,
then make that a separate movie, we don’t need a human as the central character
when it’s called Transformers. We need human characters, but not at the expense
of the real story. Transformers is more than bad robot fighting good robot, it’s
a civil war on a galactic scale! Imagine the movie North and South or Glory
with machines—that’s what Transformers could be. These robots have backstories
and real emotions, they’re not just there to protect Sam. But these things
continue to make more money and more money, so I guess slow motion explosions
and titties bouncing > the battle for Cybertron.
What are your list of movies you want a do over on?
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