Some more remakes that should never have been made, in my humble opinion:

"The Italian Job". By all means make another film with minis as the stunt stars, but this film was really an English "feel-good" movie; in 1969, Britain was still feeling a warm glow after the football team had won the world cup three years earlier, and the BMC minis were winning the Monte Carlo and other rallies in spite of all sorts of bias from organising bodies. The high point of the film was Noel Coward, an epitome of Englishness himself, slowly descending the stairs in prison while hundreds of convicts cheer for England, and almost bursting into tears of pride at the bottom.

A US version of this would probably need a ra-ra band, tons of balloons and streamers and cheerleaders. The effect would be cheesy and repellent.


"Mission Impossible". I am not surprised that Greg Morris, one of the stars of the original TV series, stormed off the set, declaring it to be a travesty. It lost all the intellectual curiosity of the original and made it into a cliche-ridden Tom Cruise wank-fest.


"The Jackal". The original "Day of the Jackal" was a tad far-fetched, but at least it had a coherent plot.


You will notice that two out of my three examples are US remakes of British originals. While genres might translate, individual films don't. I have no doubt that if someone tried to remake an american film in a british setting, the effect would be wooden and tedious.

(An odd aside here; "Gorky Park", set in Moscow, had american actors playing the hero and villain, while British actors played the Russian minor parts. The general opinions from the US public was that the British actors were "unbelievable". I assume that to mean that they were unconvincing, rather than superlative.)