FILM: The Ring Hollywood remake

This post was originally in Japanese and cost less to produce

It's difficult not to be disappointed by a Hollywood remake of a classic movie. Usually, a remake happens because a film has performed amazingly well at the box office, despite being in French, Japanese or so low budget you can see the sticky-back plastic. Or it drew huge crowds 50 years ago and an updated colour version seems like a safe money-spinner. In order to release it to a wider audience (for wider audience read Americans) you naturally have to create a version they can handle. So out goes the foreign language, as does any complicated plotting and character development, and in come extremely good-looking people who look wholesome and sexy at the same time.

Unfortunately, this leads to such an anodine, pointless botch of the original story you wonder why they bothered. You'd think studio execs would be embarrassed to be putting such low-grade knock-offs out into the marketplace but I think they probably feel like they're doing a public service. They're mushing together a version for people of any age, gender or IQ and the people that will go and watch this movie have no idea what the original is like because they don't watch movies with subtitles or that happened to do well at this year's Sundance festival. So what if fans of the original think it's a poor effort? Those arthouse hippies aren't wolfing down extra large buckets of popcorn and pushing up the profits for Police Academy 12, so let them be annoyed. Besides, enough of them will come and see the movie anyway just so they can say it isn't as good as the original, how's that for irony you pretentious suckers?

My personal nightmare of a remake was the Bridget Fonda version of La Femme Nikita, called The Assassin. If you've seen the original - and if you haven't I can't recommend it highly enough - you'll know it's a great movie. It's got fully-fleshed out characters, amazing performances by the leads, sexual tension by the bucket-load, a great storyline and some wonderful action sequences. It's as close to a perfect movie as I've ever seen, and I never get tired of watching it. But what's most amazing about it are the understated elements, such as Nikita's first assignment and what happens between her and 'the cleaner' on a later mission. Your average burger-eating moron doesn't do understatement, though, so lets just blow some stuff up and turn a wonderful brief onscreen relationship into a fight scene. Yeah that should do it, especially when the actress is so wooden you could make a coffee table out of her.

I like to think I'm not a knowitall, though, and I practically beg to be proved wrong ocassionally. Robert Rodrigues remade El Mariachi as Desperado. The original only cost him $10,000 but the truckloads of Hollywood money that went into the second movie really helped make it an action classic. (Just for the record and to head off the snotty comments from true film snobs, yes I know it's the second film in his Mariachi trilogy but come on it's a straight remake with a big budget). But that's nearly 10 years ago, the first movie was in 1993 and Desperado came out in 1995.

It's taken that long for a similar work to be given the Hollywood treatment and survive intact. I've just watched The Ring and I was amazed at the job they did on it. Even knowing the plot of the original, which they manage to stick to pretty much, the tension in some of the scenes was intense. This is despite the fact that Sky Movies' current advert gives away a massive plot point for anyone who hasn't seen it. I won't say what it is because I hate reading things that give you a spoiler, but it's the most pivotal point in the movie. Idiots.

And before anyone starts, I know I'm a bit late reviewing this. But I watched its first run on Sky Movies last night, rather than go to the cinema to see it. It was cheaper to buy the original Japanese movie on DVD than to pay London cinema ticket prices for the missus and I to see the remake. If Hollywood had any record for doing good remakes maybe I wouldn't have waited this long.