Y’know, I’m beyond getting exasperated about Hollywood’s insistence on remakes.  They’re just gonna keep doing them, and they’ll almost never be as good as the originals, which we can always throw in the DVD player anyway.  Besides, to be honest, I’ve got a few ideas of my own for several remakes…

So when I hear that Warner Bros. is planning to update Sam Peckinpah’s superviolent Western classic The Wild Bunch, I just holster my sixguns and throw up my hands in defeat.  Training Day writer David Ayer is wrangling the outlaws into the modern day, keeping the setting (the Mexican border) and the copious gunfights, but filling the ranks with drug cartels and CIA agents. Ayer will also direct his own script — he got the nod based on the strength of his indie Harsh Times, with Christian Bale as a hard-partying ex-soldier on a wild night.

Veteran producer Jerry Weintraub is behind the project.  Ayer, who also worked on The Fast and the Furious and has been a script doctor for years, has previous remake experience from… um, SWAT.  Oscar-winning scribe Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential) had his own plans a few years ago for a Wild Bunch remake, with a group of former LA cops heading south of the border for a heist, but it never materialized.  My voodoo dust has since worn off, it seems.