10 Films That Are As Bad As You've Heard
6. The Hitcher
Ladies and gentlemen, the Michael Bay formula for remaking popular hits: if it doesn’t move at speed, explode or get naked, out it goes.
Gone is Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character, while lead Jim Halsey becomes a college student driving to Spring Break with his lingerie model girlfriend, who wears short shorts and is first seen removing her top. To make sure the target demographic doesn’t get bored, every let up in the action has been removed from Eric Red’s original story, which works amazingly well if their intention was to suck all the life out of the movie.
In the same year that Michael Myers returned with an overlong backstory, John Ryder (Sean Bean – who was better as the bad guy in Bay’s The Island) was back as the hitchhiker your mother warned you about. There are no flashbacks to Ryder’s messed-up childhood here, just a ton of cheap shocks, ripped-out throats and it-was-all-a-dream moments, none of which appear in Robert Harmon’s original. With no proper build-up, no suspense and nobody worth rooting for, we’re all of a sudden adrift in a movie with plenty of running around and stuff blowing up, and very uninteresting it is too.