My first thought was Robin Hood: Men In Tights. I soooo could have made that a good movie. The first thing to do would be totally re-cast it. Dave Chappelle and Megan Cavanaugh get fired, Richard Lewis gets run over by a steamroller. Then I would tighten the action, drop all the “Let’s telegraph every stupid joke I’ve done 80 times before” that Brooks filled the movie with, and actually make it funny!
Actually, they already have. The problem is, it’s rarely seen, and hasn’t been released theatrically or on video AFAIK. It was done from Vritish TV, and has run on PBS here in the states. This new version is very faithful to Wyndham’s book:
The really frustrating thing is that back in 1975, Mel Brooks did a sitcom about Robin Hood – When Things Were Rotten, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0072585/ – that was actually funny! What’s Mel’s problem? Why have his powers degenerated so pathetically? Alzheimer’s?
Judge Dredd: not even a bad film, let alone a terrible one, but it just *wasn’t * Judge Dredd, just some amiably forgettable futuristic actioner. It had some nice touches: moving the penal colony from Titan to Aspen was actually pretty funny, Mean Angel and Hammerstein were very well realised, and the setting looked like Mega City One: some very nice production design there.
But the main character…wasn’t Judge Dredd: the writers had no idea who the character was supposed to be, and the casting didn’t help matters: he was just every grumpy cop with a soft heart, a “funny” sidekick and a quirky catchphrase from every other Stallone movie you’ve ever seen.
The Judge Dredd of the comics is a bastard, a quasi-facist faceless avatar of justice who is his job: when he says “I am the Law”, he means it quite literally - it’s his raison d’etre, and he doesn’t exist outside it - no friends, no family, no sidekicks. He judges people. That’s all he does.
But the grimness is leavened by the fact that he’s the straight man who doesn’t get the gag: he’s humourlessly policing a giant madhouse, in which everyone is unemployed, bored and stupid, and so amuse themselves by behaving as absurdly as possible while Dredd labours vainly to impose order on this chaos.
The one director I think of who could capture that is Terry Gilliam: there’s a lot of that very English absurdist black humour in both Brazil and Dredd, and the urban dystopias aren’t too far removed: of course, no studio was going to give Gilliam a huge amount of money to make a grimly ridiculous film of a comic most people had never heard of, and so they neutered it instead. Inevitable, really.
Oh yeah, and Bruce Campbell should have played Dredd: he’s got the perfect chin for the part, and he would have got the joke. Bruce Campbell in a Terry Gilliam film of Judge Dredd: fanboy heaven.
Seem to be more than a couple Keanu Reeves films listed here. Huh. Wonder why?
I’ll add another of his:
Johnny Mnemonic. I remember reading the book, finishing it, putting it down, and saying, “Wow.”
I remember watching the movie, finishing it, walking out of the theater, and saying, “That sucked.”
Dungeons and Dragons. Call me a fanboy, but I was so hoping for a good movie and not that mindless drivel and testament to bad acting. See, in my mind, if it had been successful, producers would see that and flood the market with other sword and sorcery movies, perhaps even creating a franchise under the D&D banner. In the end, I was hoping it would culminate in Michael Moorcock’s Elric Saga finally being brought to the big screen (especially after hearing Warner Bros optioned the story). But alas, the movie was a colossal flop and nary a fantasy swords and sorcery movie has come out since.
I remember thinking, well, it’s got Jeremy Irons in it, that’s a good sign, right? Pfshaw!
Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction could’ve been amazing movies if they’d been based on the actual books upon which they were supposedly based and cast with people who both were able to act and chose to.
The success of the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer shows that the theatrical version could have been good.
But Bret Easton Ellis’ “novel” Less Than Zero had no plot. And precious little characterization. What director would be up to the challenge of making that work on the big screen?
Andy Warhol? David Lynch? Hell, Paul Bartell’s take on it would’ve at least been funny. Anything other than the deadly earnest treatment given it by…Marek Kanievska?!
And I disagree that LTZ had no plot. It didn’t have much of one but it was there, and the movie managed to get every point of it wrong. And the casting was fairly awful, simply because many of those cast couldn’t act wet in a rainstorm (I’m looking at you, Andrew McCarthy and Jami Gertz!) and those that could for the most part decided not to (Robert Downey Jr? James Spader? You know who you are!). I mean for god’s sake, if you can’t get a believable performance out of Robert Downey Jr and a drug addict then you’re just not trying.
Wild Wild West, and in general, any movie made from a TV show by people who have NO IDEA why the TV show was good in the first place. I’ve never been a big fan of Will Smith, he plays his action roles much too broadly, with traces of latter-day Stepin’ Fetchit that everyone overlooks because he gets top billing and loads of cash. The guy trying to talk the crowd out of lynching him by deconstructing the word ‘redneck’ is not James West. And that’s before we even see the 80-foot-long mechanical spider.
Mission: Impossible did the same thing. The series was all about the team; the technical and personal complexity that they’d have to use to steal the oil contracts from the heavily guarded safe of some South American dictator or something. They turned it into a lone-wolf star vehicle for Tom Cruise, with a ridiculous action-movie climax. And they completely, utterly, totally, and in every other way, butchered the theme song.
Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow could have been great. And my problem isn’t that there was too much jungle. I didn’t like the way Gwyneth Paltrow played Polly. She was clearly supposed to be the fast-talking, pull-no-punches, confident Girl Reporter; Paltrow played her way too wishy-washy. Rosalind Russell would have never second-guessed herself about keeping and hiding those three vials. Secondly, the action scenes fell prey to the trend of hyper-kinetic motion at the expense of everything else. Seriously guys, don’t turn a dogfight into a swarm of gnats; I don’t give a fuck about a gnat. Gorgeous movie to look at, though; I really liked it the first time I saw it, on a big screen in a foreign language.
28 Days
When a buddy described the premise, I thought cool. Not anything new, but done well this could be good.
Of course for it to have been good we would have had to have…let’s see…main characters acting consistently, or as if they had a frickin’ brain!!! Example (one of thousands) I’m so worried for my daughter’s safety, I’ve holed up in our apartment building and stood guard with riot gear at the top of the steps…what’s the first thing I do when I leave the safety of this arrangement…hmmm, let’s see, drive through a dark tunnel where there are likely to be zombies, and drive over parked traffic in my cab as if it were a monster truck. Come on. 
I liked the book and the movie.
I think you mean 28 Days Later.
28 Days was the one with Sandra Bullock and Viggo Mortensen in rehab.
Aliens3.
There was SO much source material they could have drawn from…there were so many ideas they could have used that would have made this an excellent movie, first of which and best would have been the aliens reach earth. But nooo…they hired an MTV video director, killed off two of the main characters before the credits and made what looked like a straight-to-video horror flick that sucked.
And of course Starship Troopers.
It is a BAD movie, but that “MTV video director” turned out to be one of the best and brightest (or I should say DARKEST) Hollywood directors, David Fincher: a guy with an amazing visual style and an innovative, risky feeling to every movie he’s made since (Seven, Fight Club).
Well, that’s if you LIKED those movies…I didn’t particularly care for either one. Both were well made but Se7en was anticlimactic and murky and Fight Club, although intriguing and engrossing, was in the end a letdown for me.
Ahem. Yeah, that’s what I meant. Pisses me off so bad I can’t even remember the title.
But that movie would have been better with Sandra Bullock driving a taxi over parked cars like it was a monster truck.
Mists of Avalon, although that may need to be a mini-series because it’s such an involved story.
What? What’d you say? TNT? Sorry, I can’t understand you.
Or Sandra Bullock being attacked by rage-fueled zombies.
Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles would have been much better if the smuggling mystery had been dropped in favor of doing a send-up of the entire movie-making business. It should have been like Last Action Hero but focused outward instead of inward.