It’s rare that a day goes by around here at Cinema Blend that we don’t have to type up news of yet another remake or reboot getting the green light. It’s frustrating, both as a sign of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy and risk aversion, and because they often end up remaking movies that really, really don’t need to be remade in the first place (Evil Dead, Robocop…Psycho). This one, however, is just plain weird. Variety reports that the 1984 gangster flick The Hit is being remade by director Stephen Frears, writer Peter Prince, and producer Jeremy Thomas…the exact same people who made it the first time around.
The original movie starred John Hurt and Tim Roth as a pair of somewhat inept hitmen tasked by the mob with abducting an informer (Terence Stamp) and dragging him back to Paris to be executed. It turns into a sort of road-trip comedy as one thing after another goes wrong. The new remake would relocate the story across the pond to the U.S. and Mexico. Thomas told Variety: “The idea is to make it as an American movie about an American gangster, to tell the story against the backdrop of the land of cinema.”
I’d almost always rather see a mediocre movie based on an original idea than a good remake. And the idea of remaking a movie with the exact same creative team seems even more pointless than otherwise. Still, it’s their story, and I suppose this is less infuriating than having some third party come in and stomp all over an idea they didn’t create.
