Four remakes nobody asked for
Bugonia, The Running Man, Highest 2 Lowest, and The Hand That Rocks the Cradle
It’s remake season again, which is to say it’s always remake season. A proper one should update the material to meet our contemporary anxieties, but most of these films manage only the gesture, not the substance.
Bugonia tries, but fails fundamentally as a movie. The Running Man delivers much amusement but never rises to what it promises. The Hand That Rocks the Cradle overcorrects. And other than relocating the story to nyc, Spike Lee’s Highest 2 Lowest… remains a mystery even to itself.
Before I get into all that: a shoutout to Screen Slate, where I’m a contributor, which just won a special award from the New York Film Critics Circle (the same ceremony that awarded Amy Madigan for Weapons). People often ask why I don’t compile film listings, and the answer is simple: Screen Slate already does it better than anyone. If you’re in NYC and want to know what to watch, start there. My weekend picks are Charade, Kōzaburō Yoshimura films, Oliver Laxe, and the Best of Spectacle.
THE RUNNING MAN
There’s nothing understated about Edgar Wright’s propulsive and advantageously slick movie—miles above and much less of an eyesore than the original 1987, which is directed by Paul Michael Glaser (best known for Starsky & Hutch and Kazaam!) and is about what you’d expect: a glob of unappealing and insurmountable cheese with Paula Abdul choreography. Stephen King’s prescient source material—set in a dystopian tomorrow, a desperate man must survive 30 days while being hunted by sanctioned goons as well as a public incentivize to turn him in—was a potent container for many urgent and contemporary themes, like economic inequality, omnipresent surveillance, and the unholy fusion of media and government. The Network is the Big Bad; the show is broadcast live and fixed for spectacle and ratings. The original film primarily treats all of that as a pretext, a loose framework for Arnold to mow down themed villains with hockey sticks and chainsaws in an arena.
Edgar Wright (Baby Driver, Shaun of the Dead) ably updates the set-pieces, but doesn’t quite take us out of the set-top days and into the internet or social media age, creating a pop-satire that beams the nation’s collective anger, beset by extreme class inequality, union busters, AI deep fakes—essentially, all the pressing issues at hand. The film’s anti-authoritarian rage is both fashionable and easy to root for (politically, I find it more successful in its clarity than One Battle After Another, which struggles with muddled themes!). However, there is a risk that by the end, our handsome protagonist Glen Powell, who ably carries the weight of the film on his \ shoulders, will morph into a superhero figure (a set-up for a sequel or just a spoonful of optimistic sugar for the audience). The Tom Cruise-aspirant exudes rizz out of his pores, and perhaps as a nod to Schwarzenegger, he is inexplicably jacked. Unlike Schwarzenegger and following the line of Hollywood movies today, Powel is partnered with a black woman and has a biracial child in need of rescuing.
Somewhat relatedly, George P. Cosamatos was supposed to direct the original. I’d love to see the unrelenting bloodbath his son Panos, who made Mandy (2017), might’ve turned out as a remake.
BUGONIA
Save the Green Planet! (emphasis not mine) was a cult object, a genre pastiche giddy on chaos. Jang Joon-Hwan’s 2003 film, in which a young crackpot and his dim sidekick kidnap a wealthy CEO they believe to be an alien prince, had a juvenile and apocalyptic flair, tossing in punkish covers of Somewhere Over the Rainbow. Yorgos’s remake is markedly different in tone, more tongue-in-cheek and teeth-grindingly cynical, like Kinds of Kindness before it.
He follows the original outline—kidnapping, torture, threat of discovery by an outsider, operatically insane finale—but pads it with ghostly flashbacks and extended exposition. The cross-cutting of the opening scenes lays bare the socio-economic differences with numbing clarity. Jesse Plemons’ Teddy Getz does burpees on his uneven wood floor while Emma Stone’s pharm-tech overlord jogs in an altitude mask. He bikes; she commandeers a G wagon. We dislike her instantly, because we know we’re meant to.
All of the bloat is plausibly meant to enhance the character development, but really serves one purpose: to give Emma Stone, here a 4th-time collaborator and also the film’s producer, enough screen time to finetune her brand of brittle hauteur, another “unlikable” character for her resume. Too bad because Stone is more compelling in a comedic register. How I long for the days of Easy A or that time she stained Jonah Hill’s pants with period blood. [[*okay, i misremembered. T.M. Brown pointed out that it was Amanda Zubillaga’s character and not Stone’s. you get the point though.]]
The original plunged headfirst into the violence, but Yorgos teases it out laboriously, so that when the inevitable cruelty arrives, it feels overdetermined and unnecessary. Stone’s character’s recalcitrance is frankly irritating, mirroring Yorgos’s own condescending moralism. (Yorgos’s resistance to language has also evolved from stilted deadpan into the nauseating corporate lingo and weaponized therapy speak of today. let’s have a dialogue). He loathes the world he’s built, and makes sure that we know it. Maybe he’s seeing too much red, so his argument—about climate change, conspiracy culture, corporate medicine, the rich and the poor—never coheres into something more astute. Save the Green Planet! at least had a detective-story feint, a procedural red herring that grounded its delirium and gave you something solid to hang onto. But Bugonia shows how flimsy the whole thing becomes once you strip away the genre bones and comic hijinx.
THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE
The 1992 Hand That Rocks the Cradle is one of those post–Fatal Attraction thrillers about a beautiful yet unhinged woman who materializes to threaten the nuclear family. It also had the unfortunate effect of pitting two women against each other, while it was a man who clearly started the mess. The new Hand That Rocks the Cradle directed by Michelle Garza Cerverawants no part of that legacy; it dutifully explains why mother and nanny are adversaries, leaving us with a parable of wounded outsiders and trauma.
Since “crazy bitches” must now arrive preloaded with commentary, the film goes out of its way to contextualize every destructive impulse until none remains. The nanny from hell, played beautifully by Maika Monroe, is now a victim of sexual assault in this version, which is designed not only to explain her behavior but to morally indemnify her on some level. She’s also a lesbian now, so it’s clear that her vengeance is strictly personal without any misplaced heterosexual feeling. (The husband character here, as the original, is entirely insufferable and expendable.) Our protagonist, a high-powered attorney played wonderfully by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, comes with her own set of mental-health footnotes, including a pregnancy where she “struggled.”
As a cultural document, the movie is revealing, and more politically correct (thank god they got rid of the intellectually challenged Black handman character from 1992) and psychologically responsible. But it’s not very compelling either.
HIGHEST 2 LOWEST
Spike Lee’s remake of Kurosawa’s High and Low has that distinct feel of a “late” film, the kind a great director makes on autopilot: pleasant enough, competent enough, but strangely limp. It’s neither a vital love letter to New York nor a nervy suspense thriller, and at times it even flirts with being… sympathetic to the cops? Not a sentence one expects to write about a Spike Lee joint, and perhaps he needed them on his side for all those scenes on the subway.
Somehow I misheard, or wishfully misremembered, early chatter suggesting that Highest 2 Lowest would offer a harsher, more contemporary stance on capitalism by taking the side of the poor kidnapper—here played by A$AP Rocky—and making Denzel into a bad guy. The movie’s certainly positioned for it. He’s the king on the top of the hill, or in this case, overlooking the East River from DUMBO, and A$AP has enough charisma to float a boat. That would’ve been a better movie.
Instead of moral stakes, Lee lavishes all his attention on making sure King David’s pad is spectacularly reflective of someone in his position (CEO of a record label, not a shoe store; this is a production of Apple): Kehinda Wiley and Basquiat paintings, photos by Gordon Parks, and of Toni Morrison, Kamala “Forward” posters. Denzel, too, seems to be calling it in, complacent until he busts out in angry charisma in the studio, but it seems apt for the part he’s playing, as a man who’s fallen behind the times.
Highest 2 Lowest can’t resist a dad joke either—a winking insurance reference delivered by Dean Winters.
To your point about Emma Stone being better in a comedic register, when she asks Jesse Plemons “how many of them were Andromedans?” And he says “…two.” The way she spits “two?” Back at him had me ROLLING
Small checking thing but Stone doesn’t stain Hill’s pants with period blood in ‘Superbad,’ that’s Amanda Zubillaga.