12. Most Pointless Remake, Reboot Or Adaptation - Dracula Untold
Hundreds of movies have been made over the last century featuring Bram Stoker's iconic vampire, so it was only a matter of time before Hollywood decided to give the iconic bloodsucker a dark and gritty origin story, as is the norm these days. Even though star Luke Evans does his best with the material, Dracula Untold is a hugely generic and forgettable take on one of popular culture's most enduring characters. In an attempt to craft an origin story that balances elements of the superhero, horror and tragic romance genres, the movie seems unsure of its tone and suffers for it, ending up as a mix of half-baked ideas rather than having an identity of its own. The script and characterization are both equally thin and underdeveloped, and even with the tacked-on epilogue that was added to hastily tie the movie into Universal's plans to have its stable of monsters exist in a shared universe, Dracula Untold still only runs at 92 minutes. While the movie does feature some nice visuals, great production design and a dedicated lead performance, the final product was met with general indifference and hardly gets Universal's rebooted monsters off to a great start.
Runner Up - RoboCop
Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop is one of the best action movies of the 1980's, one that manages to offer exciting spectacle and strong characters along with its underlying social commentary and biting satire. This year's reboot isn't outright terrible, it's just kind of... there. Jose Padilha is a talented director, but his take on the material seems burdened by the constraints of working in the Hollywood studio system. J oel Kinnaman is too bland as the title hero but the solid supporting cast do their best with poorly-written roles, and while the movie makes several half-hearted passing comments about foreign policy, it quickly descends into another mundane CGI-laden action movie.
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