HOLLYWOOD MOVIE DO-OVERS: These didn’t have it remade in the shade
Dax Shepard’s damn-the-torpedoes remake of “ChiPs” turns Hollywood’s passion for recycling on its ear. But what exactly is the strategy behind all these television-show movies?
Does anyone in the cherished 18-34 moviegoing demographic even remember these programs? Not likely.
There’s a certain amount of name recognition involved, a vast degree of corporate cowardice (“Hey, it worked for ‘Star Trek!’”), but some big-screen adaptations make no sense from the start — the original shows were obscure, inane or too good (like “The Honeymooners”) to ever be equaled. Some supremely misguided examples can be found below.
› SGT. BILKO (1996) Ex-vaudevillian and burlesque comedian Phil Silvers was the original Ernest G. Bilko, con man extraordinaire, in the 1950s comedy “You’ll Never Get Rich” (subsequently retitled “The Phil Silvers Show”). In the remake, Steve Martin played Bilko, head of the motor pool at a U.S. Army base and perpetrator of what felt like a 93-minute con job.
› CAR 54, WHERE ARE YOU? (1994) Now holding a not-so-highly coveted 0 percent critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes, this remake was deemed “brainless flop-a-rooney” by Entertainment Weekly’s Lisa Schwarzbaum, who
was hardly alone in her assessment of the David Johansen-John C. McGinley version of the NBC sitcom, originally starring Joe E. Ross and Fred Gwynne as mismatched Bronx patrolmen.
› THE HONEYMOONERS (2005) Jackie Gleason was such an outsized force of comedic nature that stepping into the role of Ralph Kramden — bus driver, bowler, loyal Raccoon — was something Cedric the Entertainer should have known was going to end in wreckage and ruin. None among the predominantly African-American cast, which included Gabrielle Union, Mike Epps and Regina Hall, likely remember it very fondly.
› 21 JUMP STREET (2012/2014) It’s not that the Channing Tatum-Jonah Hill matchup is necessarily bad (or that much worse than
others), but like “CHiPs” it has almost nothing to do with the original 1987-91 show, which was eminently forgettable save for the fact that it once starred Johnny Depp.
› THE AVENGERS (1998) No, not those “Avengers.” Rather, the ones so urbanely played by Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee in the British spy series that began in 1961 and whose allure was all about the chaste heat generated by the two stars (and the more obvious heat generated by Rigg).
Uma Thurman has many attributes, as does Ralph Fiennes, but the lameness of their material, and the fact that the filmmakers so obviously had no clue as to what made the original so popular, almost made the movie seem like a deliberate attempt to strangle a franchise that might have been.