The 15 best American remakes of foreign films, ranked
The Departed, Magnificent Seven, The Ring, and the rest of these films show that sometimes a reboot can be just as good as, or even better than, the original
Film Features Films
Of all the challenges in the moviemaking universe, redoing a beloved foreign film for an American audience would seem pretty low on the list. You already have the original as a head start, so going into the project you know what works, what doesn’t, and what should be tweaked for American sensibilities. Of course, as our ranking of the 15 worst American remakes of foreign films shows, sometimes those reboots don’t always come together in the way that studios and viewers would like.
But when those remakes do work, when Hollywood adapts international source material into something magical or compelling or powerful for domestic audiences, the results can be thrilling, and even award-worthy. Witness the films on this list, in which American-based moviemakers successfully adjusted the tone, added big stars, updated the humor or the drama, and maybe even utilized fresh technology. The results? Films that honor the original yet stand on their own. Not that we Americans have to prove our superiority in, like, everything, but bonafide classics such as The Departed, Some Like It Hot, The Magnificent Seven, and The Birdcage actually improve on their still awesome originals. Here, then, is our ranking of the 15 best American remakes of foreign films.
104 Comments
I think the problem Let Me In had is that we all saw Let the Right One In a mere two years earlier.
And Let the Right One Is is a masterpiece. The remake is ok but completely unnecessary.
As someone who saw Let The Right One In with the original, horribly botched subtitles, I was grateful for a remake where everyone speaks American as our good Lord intended.
Let Me In actually followed the book a little more closely than the original film, which I appreciated as a fan of the book. But Let the Right One In is a much tighter movie. I think they both have their merits for those different reasons.
I came to say this exactly. Let Me In is fine, but I’d already see Let the Right One In, and it didn’t compare.
Is one of these movies the one with an infamous “pool scene”?
They both have them, and they are both unsettling, but I find the Swedish version more artistic, and American version more gratuitous. Which… tracks.
That’s what a lot of people said about the American Dragon Tattoo, too.
When I finally saw Infernal Affairs I was surprised how closely Martin followed it. Some scenes are shot for shot copies. Love both.
When I first saw The Departed I knew it was a remake, but hadn’t seen Infernal Affairs. My wife, however, was the opposite. She’d seen Infernal Affairs but didn’t know The Departed was a remake. But then as soon as the elevator scene started she grabbed my hand and almost shouted in the theater, I know what happens! Apparently that was the moment she realized it was a remake.
I haven’t seen Some Like It Hot in a long time, but I completely forgot Edward G. Robinson was in the movie. Without looking it up, I can’t remember who he played.Also, I’m a huge fan of Nordic Noir, but I cringe every time people bring up the Millennium Trilogy. It’s one of the most hollow examples of the genre and the main character is a complete male Mary Sue.
Edward G. Robinson is 100percent not in “Some Like It Hot”.
That’s because he isn’t in it. His son, Edward G. Robinson, Jr., has a small part as the gangster who comes out of the cake.
Looks like AVClub forgot to add the all important “Jr.”
“the gangster who comes out of the cake.”lol. Even describing scenes in the movie, splits my sides
I am unashamed by how much I still love The Ring. I saw the original film (I think? Probably not the TV film) beforehand, which I think is now very dated, but I think The Ring is probably my favourite horror movie of all time.It’s almost gore-free (definitely a selling point for me) and it’s not particularly scary by many standards – the precocious child stuff also rings a little false despite how it’s supposed to work thematically. However, the film still works as a very slow, creepy investigative thriller, and the tape itself I feel has lost none of its ability to unnerve. Sure, the coup de grace probably only really works once, but it remains a superb visual conceit.
For me, it’s probably the best sustained creepiness in a film since the original Carnival of Souls. In particular, the scene where the horse panics on the ferryboat unsettles me more than just about anything in more conventional horror films.
The TV part at the end is still one of my favorite reactions from moviegoers at the cinema. Things were flying in the air
I saw it at home and pretty much pasted myself to the ceiling when I got to that scene. It’s a great moment.
SO. FUCKING. SCARY.
In addition to being a terrific horror movie, it’s a terrific compendium of technologies that disappeared over the next ten years. There are plot points involving videotapes, landline phones, waiting to have photos developed, and CRT televisions.
I think Haneke would be disappointed to see “Funny Games” classified as “torture porn.” Seems to grossly distort his purpose.
indeed
The Birdcage is fantastic.
It’s also an example of how you can make a successful movie with a flamboyantly gay couple at the center – quality story, writing and acting. Who knew? And that was selling to audiences more than 25 years ago. Meanwhile this year you get the director of Bros complaining no one went to see it because they’re all homophobes. Maybe it’s because your cast was a black hole of charisma and it looked boring as hell?
Billy Eichner is no Robin Williams or Nathan Lane.
In fairness that’s a heavy lift for anyone.
There is a kind of comfortable distance for mainstream audiences in the film because Williams and Azaria weren’t gay, and Lane wasn’t out at the time. I think it’s a terrific movie, but I’m sure at the time if it had been performed by actual out gay men, it wouldn’t have been nearly as popular. That’s still probably the case, though we’re inching closer to overall acceptance, notwithstanding drag queen storytime panic.
I think we’re inching away from acceptance, to be honest. In the 90s, movies like The Birdcage, Ms. Doubtfire and Too Wong Foo all featured drag as the main storyline, and they were all universally praised. Now? Swaths of right-wing conservatives want an entire boycott of Disney, accusing the company of “grooming children,” because one animated child character had two moms.
Oh, totally agree. A few years ago with the push to make same sex marriage legal, we reached a relative cultural zenith on acceptance. Then MAGA happened and we’ve been backsliding a lot. For a brief shining moment though, it looked like we might have gotten past it.
True on Williams and Azaria, but Lane’s sexuality was at best the worst-kept secret in Hollywood.
Yeah, but I’m talking about general population, not in-the-know Hollywood. There’s a reason Williams stepped in when Oprah nearly outed Lane in an interview promoting the film, and it wasn’t for the worst kept secret crowd.
I guess I just thought it was obvious, well before he came out. Sort of like Ellen Degeneris.
Bros is pretty funny and sweet. It’s not as good as Difficult People, but it’s still solid.
The movie sizzles, playing out across a lean two-and-a-half hoursHuh? Infernal Affairs is lean — in and out in well under 2 hours. The Departed is fine, but being nearly an hour longer, it is (and feels) very bloated in comparison.
The only time it drags for me is the scenes with Farmiga. I don’t feel her involvement or storyline added anything much to the proceedings, and it frankly felt off that a police therapist with a live-in boyfriend would start sleeping with a patient she barely knows.
It’s relative. The Departed largely works in its own right, but it’s in no way the tight thriller that Infernal Affairs is, which is why describing it as “lean” seems so weird.
I guess that The Departed is lean in comparison to Scorsese’s other work
Fair point – not lagging is not the same thing as tight. Scorsese always takes time to let his stories feel lived-in, so I’m not surprised Departed takes its time relative to the original.
Good to know that I’m not the only one who thought that interaction was really creepy.
All fair points
A list of remakes that includes shot-for-shot nonentities like “Ring” which were basically rushed into production because American audiences don’t like to read, but ignores “Victor/Victoria”, a brilliant director’s last great work which was nominated for seven Oscars as well as a Cesar, multiple Golden Globes and a Grammy, for goodness sake… Seems incomplete.
Victor/Victoria is considered a US/UK co-production since it was shot entirely at Pinewood, but don’t let that get in the way of your smarmy indignance
Verbinski’s The Ring is not as good as the original, but I don’t think it’s a “shot-for-shot nonentity” – it’s thoughtful and well-acted, and adds in a couple of interesting and scary scenes that are worth the time.Ironically, if it had been a “shot-for-shot” version they wouldn’t have blown the impossible dread of the final scene in favour of a jump scare.
Yes, everyone rightly thinks of the big performances of Williams and Lane in The Birdcage, but Hackman’s utter perfection as the straight man is what makes the movie, giving all of the lunacy something to play against. His confident obliviousness which eventually gives way to bewilderment as everything unfolds is just brilliantly played.
Dianne Wiest deserves some credit there as well.
Dianne Wiest deserves more credit in basically everything she’s ever been in.
It’s funny — I don’t particularly care for Wiest, but goddammit if she isn’t perfectly cast in everything I’ve seen her in — this, The Lost Boys, and Parenthood.
Oh yeah he’s in peak form in that movie.
Gene Hackman’s range is underappreciated. Consider the same actor played “Popeye” Doyle and Lex Luthor…..
Hackman’s utter perfection He really is great in The Birdcage – but then he is always good. I think his character really anchored the remake in a way that the original was missing.
Matt Baume’s video on Some Like It Hot is fantastic (as is pretty much all of his stuff):
The Departed is marky-markedly inferior to Infernal Affairs.
The worst part of his is that because his character exists and knows what he knows, the plot is mostly rendered moot. Which is weird that they wen’t through it–either characters or Scorcese.
I can’t stand Marky-Mark but he was goddamned hilarious in The Departed.
La Totale! is absolutely great, and the remake is so similar that you can watch the original without subtitles and without knowing a word of French and still understand everything that is happening. True Lies is beat for beat exactly the same move. Bonus: the star of La Totale!, Thierry Lhermitte, is extremely handsome.
La Totale is not great and True Lies is kilometers above it, and I love Thierry Lhermitte, Miou Miou, and Eddy Mitchell. But this looks like a student movie in comparison.
I don’t come to movies for set pieces, and I found the acting and humor in La Totale! more to my taste. But I agree to disagree.
Give True Lies its due – it’s not only a great popcorn flick (problematic anti-Arab sentiments notwithstanding), it’s also the first and last time anyone or anything has been able to honestly generate the word sequence “a hilarious Tom Arnold.”
Well the thing most movies like True Lies, just use whoever the current “boogey man” is on the world stage. In the 70 to the 90’s the “bad guy” was almost always Russian, then in more modern times it got changed to “Middle Eastern” at least in True Lies case the mostly used people of middle eastern descent to play the middle eastern characters.
Art Malik is a Pakistani-born Brit, though. South Asian, not Middle Eastern. Not that it matters, though, as the nationality of the group in True Lies is never specified.
Fair enough, I honestly wasn’t sure where any of them were from, just more so they all fit the “generic” “middle eastern” appearance lol.
I’ve mentioned this on some other post about True Lies and I know it is problematic, but I *still* reference the bit where Tom Arnold says something like “I came home, she took everything. She even took the ice cube trays out the freezer. What kind of sick bitch takes the ice cube trays out of the freezer?”
Should jihadist groups be off limits as movie villains? I mean, since the release of that film, they haven’t exactly gone out of their way to redeem themselves.Interesting, though, the actor who played the main villain of the jihadist organization in True Lies also portrayed a heroic mujahideen Bond ally in The Living Daylights.
Funny Games is a fucked up movie. I don’t like learning that there are two of them.
Its like a bespoke artisan shit sandwich , I mean its all really well made , and uses the best available ingredients , but at the end of the day its still something unpleasant that leaves you feeling shitty and sick afterwards .
Yep. I can’t say it was a good movie or a bad movie. “Fucked up” is the only adjective I have for it, and all I know is I did not feel good after.
Bespoke Artisan Shit Sandwich is the name of my GG Allin cover band.
Take your Paul & Storm star, damnit.
I really like both versions of Funny Games, it’s a good wallow, and the remote control moment gets me every time
I don’t remember the remote control moment. I don’t want to remember the remote control moment!When I want a good wallow I watch Untamed Heart, not a family getting tortured by dead eyed kids. lol
(ANathanofFillions rewinds time, does not reply to ElectricSheep’s comment, looks at camera)
you’re not serious about the italian job? really?
I assume that’s the one terrible example put in the list to drive the comments section (which …yes I know , is what I’m doing) . The American version is terrible.
The remake of The Italian Job is a nearly serviceable caper film. By that I mean predictable and dull, but the heist sort of works within the logic of the film. Still …. the characters (and many of the actors) are just dull and interchangeable. I dimly recall that part of it takes place in Italy, and that’s where any similarities between the original (which is delightful) and the remake begins and ends.
Yeah, the original is brilliant. The remake is okay to see once or leave on in the background. I doubt I’ve ever watched the remake a second time.
Agreed. Does the remake have:- Noel Coward? No, it wastes Donald Sutherland on a thankless character with the same name.- Benny Hill lamenting, “It’s a pity people aren’t as lovely as flowers”?- One of cinema’s all-time greatest endings? No. It has Statham’s then-girlfriend getting her clothes blasted off by loud music, and a Marky Mark voiceover.That it wastes a genuinely promising non-Wahlberg cast – Sutherland, Charlise Theron, Mos Def, Ed Norton, Jason Statham (though before he found his action groove) – is an additional crime.
When did the consensus turn on the American version? It was pretty well received by critics at the time and quite popular with audiences (it was Paramount’s highest grossing film that year and made almost triple its budget back). I haven’t seen it since it was in theaters, nor have I seen the original, so I guess I can’t speak to its enduring quality, but it’s kind of weird to see such hostility over it now since it was fairly well-liked 20 years ago.
I fucking hated the original “Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” Is Fincher’s version much different?
It depends on what you dislike about the original. The darkness and sexual violence is still there. I actually liked Fincher’s movie better, because I felt that the original got bogged down in the minutiae of the book’s overly detailed magazine publishing world. You could tell that Blomkvist was a total wish fulfillment character for Larsson. I felt Fincher streamlined it into more of a movie than just a book adaptation. The actors in the original are great though.
Having watched both, if you hated the original movie Fincher’s isn’t going to change your mind. It’s a bit tighter overall that the Swedish version, but fundamentally not all that different.
If I was middle aged magazine journalist like Larsson then I too would create a character who is a middle aged magazine journalist that solves crimes and almost every woman with a pulse wants to sleep with.
Lol – point taken. I love how one of the “rules” for writers trying to get published is “Don’t make the main character a writer.” Larsson was like, “Enh, screw it.”
that’s what annoyed the hell out of me about the book, the way larsson portrayed “publisher of a random swedish print (not dead yet!) journal with a circulation of maybe 12,500” as a job so cool it made you wildly rich and had women throwing themselves at you.
Where’s Sorcerer? You could debate which one is better but there’s no question it’s a hell of an achievement in white-knuckle action filmmaking.
So, tell the truth. Have you ever actually watched Some Like it Hot? Because it seems like you just scanned the IMDB for it. Edward G. Robinson is not in it. At the same time you left out Joe E. Brown who delivers a wonderful performance and the movies crowning glory of a last line.
The remake of The Ring is good but it’s nowhere near as good as the original. It does get points for perfectly recreating the opening scene so well it might well just be an overlay with new actors put in.
My friend had a theory that people liked whichever version of The Ring they saw first, because that’s the one that scared the pee out of them. Both movies are very good, but the second one can’t surprise you like the first one did.Personally, I agree with you that the Japanese one was better, because nothing overtly supernatural happens until that scene — yet the foreshadowing is so good you don’t lose your suspension of disbelief at that moment.
In the American one, you see minor supernatural things happening all along, so that scene has a little less impact.
It depends on what you want. I appreciate that the Ring delivered exposition through a whole investigation subplot, where Ringu has a psychic character explain it. However, my favorite scene from either movie is the woman in Ringu seeing a ghost with a white cloth over his face reflected in a TV screen.
You’re recommending the 2003 Italian Job starring charisma-vacuum Mark Wahlberg? I thought the U.S. and U.K. were supposed to be allies but you’ve just declared war.
I don’t think the remake is good.But I also don’t think the original is as amazing as most of the comments are making it out to be.
It’s an effortlessly cool 60s classic with a host of instantly familiar British faces and more than a couple of eminently quotable lines, in my opinion. But so long as we both agree the remake is dogshit, let’s be pals.
Buddy Buddy holds a special place in my heart because I watched it at the theaters with my grandpa when I was 6.
The Ring is not better than the Japanese remake, what??
No one said it was, sweetie.
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Its a real masterpiece
The “Funny Games” remake did indeed retain the stiltedness and the heavy handed, self righteous finger wagging, alright
I friggin’ love 12 Monkeys. It is the most I’ve ever enjoyed being upset and disturbed by a movie.
I cant believe you listed Funny Games. That movie (US version anyway) is awesome. Ive never seen anyone mention it in any capacity. Nice job.
I know the piece itself doesn’t say it but the setup for the whole article refers to remakes being better than the original. With that in mind, The Magnificent Seven is a worthy, terrific movie. Better than Seven Samurai? No. Just don’t.
The Ring, Dark Water, there were a spate of horror films that look like they were shot through a moldy shower curtain. I’ve heard The Ring called the best adaptation of Ringu and also the worst adaptation of all time…but for the worst adaptation of all time don’t forget the american remake of One Missed Call by Takashi Miike. Miike made a total cash in by putting together all the elements of J-horror in one place and then just went to town with it and it’s great (and intentionally derivative) but he actually delivers. The remake was a copy of a copy so it is only the most hackneyed thing you can imagine…and then Miike’s sequel was a copy of a copy of a copy and I turned it off after 15 minutes.
the only entry on this list that actually improves on the original is Some Like It Hot, albeit by significantly departing from the original. The other entries are decentish English-language remakes of films which are still best-seen in their original versions.* I guess 12 Monkeys is another exception: the original 30min Chris Marker short is fantastic, but Gilliam’s extended riff on it in feature-film format is also very good, and different enough that I recommend watching both.
I’m sad to be reminded that we live in a world where Fincher didn’t get to do the other two “The Girl With…” books.