4. Last Man Standing (1996) Is A Fistful of Dollars (1964)
Previously I talked about
A Bug's Life as a remake of
Seven Samurai, which we all know was remade as
The Magnificent Seven, because western audiences hate having to read those words that flash up on the bottom of the screen during foreign movies. The motion picture that started this whole Japanese samurai movie into western trend, though? That was Sergio Leone's
A Fistful of Dollars, which adapted another Kurosawa movie,
Yojimbo, and also starred Clint Eastwood in the role that confirmed he was uber-cool and made him famous. Walter Hill (who coincidentally directed
The Driver, also mentioned earlier in this list) was the man behind
Last Man Standing, which starred Bruce Willis as a Prohbition-era drifter (did such a thing exist?) who wanders into a small town and finds himself caught inbetween two feuding gangs. If you've seen
A Fistful of Dollars or
Yojimbo, you'll know already that that's the plot for those movies. Hill doesn't just keep the basic premise, though: the whole more is nearly entirely the same, all except for the fact that it's not very good. In a rare example, Hill's movie does credit
Yojimbo as an inspiration, but it does better resemble Leone's
Dollars.