20 Great Movie Remakes With One Miscast Role
9. Robin Williams as Walter Finch - Insomnia (2002)
Insomnia: the most overlooked title in Christopher Nolan’s filmography.
It takes LAPD detectives Will Dormer and Hap Eckhart (Al Pacino and Martin Donovan) to Alaska, where their efforts to assist local police on a murder case are complicated by the fact that Eckhart is about to testify against Dormer to Internal Investigations, that Dormer shoots and kills Eckhart accidentally while pursuing the murderer, and that the murderer Walter Finch (Robin Williams) can’t help but involve himself, playing cat and mouse with Dormer as he tries to find a way out.
Pacino is reliable as an LA detective because he’s literally been playing the role for his whole career, but Williams somehow misses the mark, despite putting in an uncannily dark turn in One Hour Photo the same year. He’s not bad, but he’s not great - definitely not One Hour Photo great - and that’s the problem. Perhaps he felt he couldn't deliver the same performance twice and tried to do something different with Insomnia.
The film really is as good as a US remake of a foreign-language film can hope to be, but it lacks more seething, sinister overtones from its villain, never totally selling him as the vicious mastermind he’s supposed to be.