According to this news that action classic "Bloodsport" is being "re-imagined." This news both relieves and appalls me. I find relief in that someone is taking a legitimately "bad" film and attempting to make it better. The appalling part for me is the pure number crunching involved here. There are two audiences for this kind of remake. Audience one is someone who's never seen this film and will go to it just to see it. Audience two is those who've seen the original and wonder what, if anything, survived here.
I'd like to see news like this happen more often. Because what they are doing here is taking a very basic idea of this "bad" film and putting an entirely new spin on it. One of my favorite recent examples of this is Paul W.S. Anderson's version of Roger Corman's Death Race 2000. He took the very basic concept of a race where the object was to kill other people and turned it into a very well made action romp. Is it better than the original? Opinions vary but I would maintain that the question is irrelevant. This "Bloodsport" falls into the same category.
A while back I thought of a way to redo the original "Bloodsport." The characters more or less remained the same but I wanted better connections between them to tie the audience closer. For example, the hero goes to this tournament to find out what happened to his commanding officer who'd been killed in that tournament. The reporter is the commanding officer's daughter who teams up with the hero to also find out what happened. The people running the tournament are fighting a civil war of sorts in that one side wants to run it for profit, the other for honor. The killing of the commanding officer sets everything in motion. Even the agents chasing the hero have a better reason to be there than "you're going to get hurt."
Now I'm not saying that any of the above would make it better but it would be closer to a movie that I'd like to see. I don't know what the producers have in mind for this remake but I'll be there to check it out if it ever gets out of development hell.
"Bad" films stick around usually because somewhere in there is an idea that works. An idea lives or dies on how it's executed. Someone else has an idea to redo Point Break. That's a film about an undercover FBI agent who surfs to catch a team of bank robbers. Is it a bad idea? Is it a good idea? Depends on how it's executed. For the record I thought the original was awesome.
