The 15 worst American remakes of foreign films, ranked
Not even the likes of Tom Cruise, Robin Williams, or Nicolas Cage could salvage these Hollywood reboots of international hits
Film Features Films
In Hollywood, it often seems that the sincerest form of flattery is to remake a foreign film. Domestic versions of international hits are a long-running thing in a town where familiarity assumes success, and risk-averse studios often fear original ideas. Here’s the thing, though: those remakes are tough to get right. They’re not necessarily translatable in terms of story, theme, milieu, and tone, let alone language.
Consider that Americanized film about a big monster attacking a major city. Seemed like the idea would travel, until you saw it. Or the stateside take on a hilarious French comedy that elicited, well, crickets in Peoria (no offense, Peoria). Or a studio’s decision to adapt an intense, violent, and ultra-twisty South Korean story, only to turn it into a watered-down mess. All of this got us thinking about the worst American remakes of foreign films. Interestingly, we had to work overtime to whittle down a long list of contenders to come up with the final, dismal 15. Here goes…
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I recall Vanilla Sky being a divisive film, but I don’t get it being one of the “worst” American remakes of a foreign film. The original Open Your Eyes was definitely better but I always liked its more flawed remake as well. Some not listed here that are worth a mention:Downhill (2020) – remake of Force Majeure, and it’s utterly HORRENDOUS despite the presence of Julia Louis-Dreyfus. It came out right when COVID first hit so it barely got talked about.Dark Water (2005), Pulse (2006), and The Eye (2008) – terrible remakes of good Asian horror films. I think Gore Verbinski with The Ring (2002) was the only one to do some justice to these kinds of films.
Vanilla Sky just never feels quite right. It’s not terrible but at the end, my reaction was just kind of “huh. okay.”
Cameron Crowe is really a vignette guy, I think. He’s much better with individual scenes than making a film out of them. Almost Famous is probably his best, and I still feel like the whole is not as great as the sum of its parts, but it does manage to hold together. Even a fiasco like Elizabethtown has some genuinely great scenes.
Not gonna lie, to me it’s hard not to enjoy a film in which someone runs around screaming “TECH SUPPOOOOOORT!!!” We had a very good time, but probably not for the reasons the movie wanted us to. Or maybe it did, we’re not sure.
The Grudge was a pretty good remake of Ju-On; The Eye remake should be in this list. It was terrible and probably ended the idea of Jessica Alba being a leading lady.
Nah that’s too recent for this list
I really like the US Dark Water. Just as effective and it looks beautifully grimy.
Disagree.
What didn’t you like? I found it a mostly successful retelling of the story.
What’s weird about Vanilla Sky is how close to the original it is. It’s like someone hit Copy/Paste and put a shiny tom Cruise filter on it. Also, I never really thought it deserved getting the remake treatment. I got half way through it and thought “this is like that animated Batman episode where he’s asleep and has to jump off the roof to wake up”. And then that’s what happened.
Oh man that Batman:TAS episode is SO GOOD! “Perchance to Dream”“Ah! Are you the dreamer or are you part of someone else’s dream? That’s exactly the question Tweedledee put to Alice…”I’m’a watch that this weekend.
Exactly! Which, by comparison, just makes it all the more disappointing when it’s Noah Taylor and not the Mad Hatter explaining everything at the end.
Nah, it definitely sands off all the edges. Like, the murder in bed scene towards the end in the original is REALLY queasy and you’re unsure if it’s a dream or not. In the American one, they have her shifting heads via bad CGI nonstop just cause you wouldn’t want to possibly disturb the audience into thinking Tom Cruise might actually be killing anyone!!! Of course they also took out the thrusting during that scene, but that’s the kind of toning down I can deal with.Similarly in the original the protagonist is killing people in the last act and it really messes with reality and is disturbing trying to figure out if the guy’s just nuts and innocent people are getting murdered…IIRC Vanilla Sky completely removed all of that.Also they added the scene where Tom Cruise loudly starts singing “What If God Was One Of Us?!” en route to the operating table, and then the soundtrack blasts a rock rendition of that song on the soundtrack. I think that was the point at which I decided I hated it.
Oh man, it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen either of them, but that totally tracks. What I remember most is watching Vanilla Sky and hating it, and then watching Abre Los Ojos and enjoying it, even though the basic plot remained pretty much the same as the remake that I hated. It’s a great example of how small production details can ruin an otherwise good movie.
Any story not by a 8 year old or younger that ends “and it was all a dream” is objectively bad.Except for the Wizard of Oz… the exception that proves the rule.
“Downhill” was like watching your own parents get divorced in real time. Yikes.
Downhill/Force Majeure was going to be my contribution to this list. I can’t believe it’s not on there. So terrible, completely bastardizes the original in favor of cheap slapstick humor.
And thanks to Kurt Russel in Vanilla Sky, I always default to existential questions or identity crises with his “I’m real” delivery.
Agreed. Both Open Your Eyes and Vanilla Sky are damn interesting. Vanilla breaks past the budgetary limitations of the first, for one thing giving us that haunting Times Square scene (which a friend of mine helped to Assistant Direct), which was quite a complicated coordinated effort with NYC to make happen in the pre-CGI days, and it also gives one of Tom Cruise’s earlier performances that stretched him. Penelope Cruz as the glue holding both together is great in both.
I would say The Italian Job, but to be honest I’ve never seen the remake on principle.
Not once in the remake does Marky-Mark break in on someone having a shit in a prison toilet in the remake. For shame.
Wait, Mark Wahlberg is in this? Does he try to say “I only told you to blow the bloody doors off” in a cockney accent?
It’s fine, but is tonally all over the map. It has an occasionally light, almost Ocean’s 11 caper feel to it, including in the moment at the end when the villain is being led away to what you know is a horrific fate while everyone else laughs and smiles.
The tall blonde woman in the remake is pretty.
Ahhh, yes. Charlize. Saw this on cable back in the day. Liked it a lot.
The remake is no classic, but it’s a fun, fluffy Saturday afternoon caper/revenge flick.
I clicked this article just to make sure Let Me In (Let the Right One In) wasn’t on this list. Both are genuinely terrific.
LET ME IN isn’t badly made, but it does discard practically everything that made the original special. Firstly, the whole question of Eli’s identity (“Nobody’s perfect,” am I right?), but also the decision to frame the early scenes from the point-of-view of a police detective instead of focusing on Oskar and his lonely pathology. Making Oskar’s mother a Jesus freak feels like a betrayal of the first film’s comfortable atheism as well.And if you’re going to set your movie in Los Alamos during the Reagan years, DO something with that, dammit.
I really liked Vanilla Sky
I cannot believe that they made The Toy twice. And the second time was fucking directed by Richard Donner…I’m very glad his career survived that ridiculous backward piece of shit.
Also, “NOT THE BEES!”
The Toy was remade in France just last year… also terrible!
One of the weirdest of these is The Jackal. It changes so much from the source movie (and novel) that it’s not really a remake at all. It’s just a generic assassin movie. I don’t know why they even bothered, although if Frederick Forsyth got any money then it’s fine with me.
Man, I’d watch Bruce Willis in anything in those days. The Jackal in particular was a high-priority watch, thanks to its enticing trailer. Ended up the most mid movie ever
I think Vanilla Sky is fine. Not great but not bad either. Around the same quality as the original.I would include 1999’s The Thirteenth Floor which is a remake of Fassbinder’s World on a Wire. Produced by Roland Emmerich.
I’m one of those weirdos who hated Adam Sandler pretty much immediately, from Billy Madison or whatever onward so nah, I would not have been first in line for Mixed Nuts.
“That’s ‘Yew Ess’!!!!’
So here’s my question. In a list of 15 worst films (or anything), is #1 the worst of the worst, or is it #15?Or is there no internal ranking, and all 15 are equally bad?
It’s not surprising that you didn’t include it here, since the original never got much attention in the US though it was a big hit in Korea, and the remake was a flop, but my personal nominee for terrible US remake is 2001’s “My Sassy Girl.” It’s about a mousy young man who gets involved with a hard-drinking, abusive but beautiful young woman, played for slapstick comedy. The 2008 remake takes out all the over-the-top weirdness, turning the young woman into a depressive puddle, so of course it went nowhere.At the time of the remake, a number of Korean-American money guys were hoping they could profit while boosting the South Korean movie industry. I think “My Sassy Girl” was the only one that was produced and released. There was talk about a remake of “Joint Security Area” from 2000, directed by Park Chang-wook, the same guy who went on to make the “Vengeance” trilogy including “OldBoy.” It also stars Song Gang-ho (later in “Parasite”) and Lee Byung-hun. JSA is about an incident at the North-South Korean border, investigated by a half-Korean UN officer. It looks like you can stream it on Tubi, and I recommend it, but it’s very different from Park’s later films. I could never see how anyone expected it to translate into US terms; luckily it never got made, but I’d have been interested in seeing what would surely have been a complete trainwreck.
I’d add Diner Le Cons to Dinner for Schmuks.