10 Recent Movies That Were HUGE Ripoffs

Whether you believe that originality is dead in Hollywood, it's certainly tough to find more than a few truly unique movies released every year, that aren't at least an adaptation of an existing story or, less creatively, straight-up ripping off movies you've already seen.

After all, the most risk-averse thing a movie studio can do when creating a "new" film is simply imitate previously successful ones, taking the overall narrative structure and replicating it with a few superficial changes.

And it's often a tactic that works wonders, yet there are also times where Hollywood gets a little too brazen about borrowing from the past, as is evidently the case with these 10 recent movies.

Each of these films, whether merely mediocre, genuinely awful, or perhaps even quite good despite their knock-off status, all clearly studied a much-loved hit movie - or even a few of them - and turned in an end product whose inspiration drew blatant attention to itself.

There are worse things for a movie to be than unoriginal, sure, but in the case of many of these films, it's tough not to view their mere existence as a cynical calculation...

Liam Neeson's most recent action thriller romp Retribution - itself a remake of a Spanish-French film of the same name - stars him as a man who ends up trapped in his car after he learns that his seat has been rigged with a bomb, which will explode if he attempts to exit the vehicle.

Gee, doesn't that sound a little familiar?

Yep, it's basically a low-budget riff on action classic Speed, replacing a bus and dozens of extras with a Mercedes SUV and... Liam Neeson and his two children, who are left perilously hanging out in the back seats.

Sure, there's the subtle but important difference that Neeson's car isn't primed to blow if the speed drops below 50mph, but the basic beats of the story - of a man being held hostage inside a vehicle by a terrorist bomber - are fundamentally the same, with a dash of Joel Schumacher's terrifically confined thriller Phone Booth thrown in for good measure.

As rip-offs go it's not terrible conceptually, but narratively never manages to get out of first gear. Seriously, just go watch Speed again instead.