10 Movies That Completely Missed The Point

There may be no more offensively stupid misstep in the history of remakes than the decision to recast 1967’s seminal comedy-drama Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner - one of the most culturally and politically important films in history - as a Saturday Night Live style dumbass culture clash sitcom.

In the original, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are upper class liberals who believe they’ve instilled in their daughter their own respect for race and equality. That is, until she brings her new fiancé home to meet her parents: a black man, played by Sidney Poitier - and they’re confronted with uncomfortable prejudices they didn’t realise they had.

At the time, the civil rights movement was the hot topic of the decade. Prior to shooting the film, seventeen US states still held interracial marriage to be illegal, and those anti-miscegenation laws wouldn’t be overturned until six months before the film’s release: the film was considered so important by the cast that they agreed to star in it without even seeing a script. In 1968, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards: Hepburn won the Oscar for Best Actress, and the screenplay won for Best Original Screenplay.

Guess Who, by contrast, tries to wring belly laughs from the idea that the late Bernie Mac is unhappy that his daughter has brought home a white dude to meet her family. To hammer this unhappy point home, the white dude is the whitest white dude in all of Caucasia: the incomparably f*ckheaded Ashton Kutcher.

That’s literally everything that director Kevin Rodney Sullivan brought to the table. It’s a disservice to the struggle that inspired the original, and to the stellar cast that thought that film was so important to sixties America. It’s even a disservice to Bernie Mac, and that fella was in House Party 3.