When Hollywood Remakes Go RIGHT!

There's something rather amazing about Nicolas Cage films. It's not that he can't act - although, seriously, we're not sure that he can - it's more that you simply don't know whether you're going to spend the last few moments of the credits shouting furiously at the screen and simulating over-the-top air rabbit punches, or hugging everyone else in the cinema, because you've just shared a moment together. A wonderful wonderful moment. A moment that could end in sex.

High points in his career include: Con Air, Wild at Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, The Rock, Vampire's Kiss, and Adaptation. Whilst crippling, let's brick up this picture house!', low points can be found after watching Snake Eyes, World Trade Centre, Ghost Rider, or, especially, The Wicker Man - a film which must surely rank as the worst remake of all time. There isn't another actor on the planet capable of such a movie-going lottery. He's either excellent, or shit. There is nothing in between.

Well, the good news filtering through the grapevine is that he's magnificent in the upcoming remake of Bad Lieutenant - which, remember, was a 1992 film, starring Harvey Keitel, about a really bad lieutenant. He was a horrible lieutenant in fact. They should really have called it Horrible Lieutenant.

Anyway, with this great news singing in our ears, we thought we'd celebrate a cluster of remakes that were definitely better than the originals...

Ocean's Eleven



The first outing for this movie featured all of the big stars of 1960 - Sinatra, Martin, Davis Jnr, some other people. And, for the most part, it's shockingly bad. Hence, it came as no real surprise that Clooney and his goons did a much better job of it in 2001, even with Don Cheadle on board, doing everything he could to bollocks the whole thing up with a preposterous British' accent. On the downside, every sequel since has been steadily worse than the one before, which probably means that Oceans Sixteen will actually cause an outbreak of hysterical cinema suicides. Stop now.



Scarface



It's actually a close call, this. The first one – made in 1932, about a mobster called Tony Camonte – is a gripping tale of a man rising up the criminal ladder. It's pretty good. But, Pacino totally blows the thing out of the water in the Florida-based 1983 remake, in which he plays Tony Montana - a street smart Cuban, who shouts obscenities throughout the film, then shoots people up whilst magnificently high on cocaine. It's Pacino's tour du force, and it basically introduced the world to his brand new acting technique, which we like to call shouting'.



Twelve Monkeys



Bruce Willis isn't a million miles away from Cage in his ability to pick horrendous films, but one that was anything but rubbish was Twelve Monkeys, which found ex-Python freak Terry Gilliam on extremely weird form as the director. It's a strange tale of time travel, world wars, freaky visions, mad scientists, and not really any monkeys whatsoever. Interestingly, it adapted much of the plot from a 1962, short French film called La Jetee, which featured only still images, a pretentious voice over, and was probably much enjoyed only by pipe smoking women who liked to wear gentlemen's trousers. In that case, a man travels through time, meets a beautiful woman, then realises that his childhood memory of watching a man get shot was actually him witnessing his own death as an adult. Sounds very familiar, that.



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