20 Most Hated Film Remakes & Reboots In Movie History

Even if you discount how objectively terrible Guy Ritchie’s Swept Away is - how bad the script is, how appalling Madonna and Adriano Giannini are (in the roles of sharp-tongued socialite diva and bullish working class sailor, respectively), how bizarre a throwback the whole thing seems to be - even setting all that to one side, it’s still one of the most poorly conceived and executed remakes in modern history.

Lina Wertmüller, the auteur behind the 1974 Italian original version of Swept Away (or Swept Away By An Unusual Destiny In The Blue Sea Of August, to give it its full title) is one of only four women ever to be nominated for the Best Director Oscar. Politically astute and perceptive, her films tended to reflect her perspectives on class, status, and transactions of power, and Swept Away was no different.

The story of a man and a woman from opposite ends of the Italian social strata of the mid-seventies, shipwrecked together on a deserted island, her Swept Away was a wholly unsentimental look at the conflict raised by the pairing of this radically different man and woman in love.

It’s a problematic relationship from start to finish. She insults and humiliates him as a servant before their positions are reversed through their adverse circumstances; he, an unreconstructed male chauvinist, berates and beats her once she’s at his mercy on the island.

Most of the ripe political subtext of Wertmüller’s film has been stripped out in Ritchie’s vapid treatment. Madonna plays an upper class American woman, Giannini a working class Italian man: instantly, the vital racial tension and caste differences inherent in the original affair vanish.

Wertmüller chose her cast carefully, with an ear for dialect and skin tone, but there’s no such circumspect casting going on in Ritchie’s sketchy little movie: without the background and the nuance it provides, all that’s left is a cheesy melodrama starring the most famous non-actress in Hollywood history.

The laziness even infects the hilarious ending. Here, as in the original, the two remain apart when real life intrudes once more… not because of a conscious decision on her part, but because her husband intercepts their communication and tricks them both. Madonna flutters helplessly, unable to do something as simple like leave the hotel and look for her lover, while Giannini rails at the sky and curses their departing helicopter like a nutter.