This remake / reboot shit Hollywood has found itself caught up within has officially crossed the line. There are some films that simply can’t be improved upon. Films so iconic that any attempt to recapture the magic stored within its frames is a futile gesture at best and an act of sacrilege at worst. Lately, Arnold Schwarzenegger films have been the target of this frenzy, with planned revisits to both Predator and Total Recall. Make any list of Schwarzenegger’s best films and those two will always be near the top. With the former, I’m always up for a new story as long as it’s good. I personally think the latter can’t be matched because Verhoeven’s take is a sheer delight of imagination, casting and violence. But in terms of sheer carnage, even it can’t match the orgy of annihilation, cheese and one-liners that is Commando.
Yet still, there is scuttlebutt (here and by our old pal, Dave Davis, over at Joblo here) that Commando is being remade….
I reject this notion. You can’t remake this film. You can’t remake Schwarzenegger in his prime, ripping phone booths out of walls, swinging on balloons in a mall, eating Green Berets for breakfast, pitchforking, machete-ing and rotary-sawing motherfuckers just to be creative. You can’t remake Bill Duke and you can’t remake David Patrick Kelly and Dan Hedaya, doing perhaps the best worst Latino accent ever. You can’t remake 200-something soldiers with guns who couldn’t hit water after falling out of a boat. And you certainly can’t remake Rae Dawn Chong missing her self defense class for all this shit. You might be able to remake a fat, bald Hispanic making a phone call in Val Verde, and you can certainly can remake a car chase in LA and even remake a little girl in danger. But by everything that is good and holy in this world, you sure as shit cannot remake Vernon friggin’ Wells.
You just…can’t.
Thanks to Felix for the tip.