10 Movie Remakes Nobody Expected Or Wanted
3. Get Carter (2000)
Another instance of location-swapping a British film to the USA, the Sylvester Stallone-fronted remake of Get Carter swaps out the Newcastle of 1971 for millennium-era Seattle, a difference so massive that swapping out the script wouldn’t have made as much difference.
Newcastle might not be in the title of Get Carter, but the North East England city is as integral a location as you’ll ever find in a film. The city defines the original, arguably providing more character and personality than Carter himself. Taking a film so fundamentally rooted in time and place and shifting it to a different where and when was always going to be a questionable move.
But it’s not just that they moved it out of Newcastle, it’s where they moved it to. America had no shortage of grim, post-industrial decay in the late nineties, and somewhere like Detroit, Philadelphia, or even Chicago could have had the potential for at least an attempt at translating the neglected, northern atmosphere so important to the original’s atmosphere. Seatle, however, is none of those things.
What’s left is a reasonably generic mid-2000s action movie that hits all the narrative beats of the original, but completely fails to maintain the one thing that tied it all together in the first place.