10 Most Disappointing Movie Reboots Since 2000

Ah, the summer of 1990: when Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall opened that June, the R-rated movie cost a then unheard of $70 million and packed in more blood, gunfights and mind-bending ideas than any of its competitors.

Clearly, the only way to remake the film for the Twitter generation was to rate it PG-13, cutting out all the zingers, all the fun and most of the plot. So much story has been removed, and replaced by blah chase sequences, that all the life gets sucked out of the story. Jessica Biel suddenly appears, and there’s a chase. Bill Nighy suddenly appears, and there’s a chase etc.

Another disappointment is that the director is Len Wiseman, who made an auspicious debut with Underworld (2003), followed it with Underworld Evolution (2006) and burst onto the Action Director’s A-list with Live Free Or Die Hard (or Die Hard 4.0, if you’re European).

Total Recall has none of that movie’s verve or excitement (no free running Frenchman, either), and since we’ve literally seen it all before, done better, there’s no reason to bother with this boring failure.