In Honor (or Disgust) of this past weekend's absolutely atrocious Conan The Barbarian, we here at ITMOD are ranting this week on our other favorite Horrendous and Offensive Bad Adaptations. There's a lot to choose from and I already know that Matt has picked at least one of my Top Five, but here ya go. Read and Weep.
5. Jonah Hex: Wow, just Wow. When I heard that Josh Brolin snagged the role as the DC Comics Western anit-hero Jonah Hex I thought that was some brilliant casting. Brolin was a dead-on choice for the scarred bounty hunter. But then I saw the trailers, and then I saw the movie. Yeash. They got pretty much everything wrong. It would probably make a good double feature with the equally terrible Wild Wild West if you wanted to put your eyeballs through the searing torture. I mean, "Sheriff of America"? What the hell were they thinking?
4. The Shining: Now, don't get me wrong. I love The Shining. It was one of the first films to scare the crap out of me. I was eleven or twelve years old when I first watched it in my parents basement and I couldn't sleep for several hours and I was struck with some serious nightmares. But as an adaptation of Stephen King's original novel...it doesn't quite work. It misses a lot of the Overlook Invasion aspect. How the Hotel infects Torrance. Nicholson is pretty much crazy from the get-go. Now, the Mick Garris gets the adaptation and it's not all bad, but it's also nowhere near as scary. I'll take the Kubrick any day, but it's still a bad adaptation.
3. Payback (The Theatrical Cut): I've ranted on plenty about this 1999 adaptation of Richard Stark's The Hunter. And I'm not gonna go repeating myself, so if you want a more in-depth dissection go HERE. Thankfully, the Straight Up Edition turned out to be a wonderful film, but this blue-tinted Kris Kristofferson screaming monstrosity pretty much flops Dead On Arrival.
2. The League of Extraordinary Gentleman (aka The LXG): Have you ever read Alan Moore & Kevin O'Neil's graphic novel series? No, is it cuz of this utterly repulsive Stephen Norrington film? Then damn, the terrorists have won. Not only did this awful, dirty film permanently retire James Bond from cinema but it also stopped plenty of comic geeks from checking out one of the greatest works of sequential art of the last decade. Seriously, stop right now and purchase volume 2 of The League. It's the best take on the War of the Worlds since HG Wells cooked it up himself...in fact, it might be better. Bold words spawned from absolute rage at this Shane West career killer.
1. I Am Legend: This is not a bad film. In a lot of ways it gets Richard Matheson's novel right were previous adaptations The Last Man On Earth and The Omega Man got it wrong (although both of those films are infinitely more entertaining than this ultimately unsatisfying flick). Where things go way off the reservation is at the climax. The last 20 minutes of this flick are completely appalling to anyone familiar with the novel. Seriously, where do you get off calling this film "I Am Legend" when you don't even have the book's "I Am Legend" climax. Still, to this day, this Will Smith vehicle can bring up as much rage as the Star Wars prequels.
--Brad
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