Original: “Yojimbo” (Akira Kurosawa, 1961)
Remake: “Last Man Standing” (Walter Hill, 1996)
Remember watching Walter Hill’s 1996 Bruce Willis vehicle “Last Man Standing” (few do…) and thinking, “Boy, this plot sounds familiar?” Well, that’s because, despite being a bullet-soaked action-thriller set in Prohibition-era Texas, the film is a direct and credited remake of Akira Kurosawa’s landmark samurai picture, “Yojimbo,” which was released 35 years earlier, and has inspired more than a few films in its time. Kurosawa’s picture stars his best-known collaborator, Toshiro Mifune, as a nameless ronin who wanders into a town plagued by warring criminals led by Seibei (Seizaburo Kawazu) and Ushitora (Kyu Sazanka). To bring peace, he decides to wipe out both forces, nominally teaming with both sides in order to play them off against each other. As is par for the course for the Japanese master, it’s thrilling, beautifully made stuff, with Mifune instantly iconic as the masterless hero (he would sort of reprise in the following year’s inferior “Sanjuro”), and the film in general is textured, unpredictable, and slyly funny. Given that the director was influenced by American Westerns and, more specifically, Dashiell Hammett novels, it seemed fair game for the storyline to cross the Pacific again. Hill’s neo-Western sees Bruce Willis’ John Smith confronting an Irish gang led by David Patrick Kelly and Christopher Walken, and an Italian one led by Ned Eisenberg and Michael Imperiorli, who are feuding over a Texas town. The film hits most of the same beats as the original but still over-convolutes what was always a perfect piece of plotting, and even if Hill’s action is typically and admirably crunchy, he seems rather disengaged. Finally, toning down Willis’ charisma to make him a taciturn man of action is a fatal mistake, one that visibly bores the actor, his co-star, and the audience, making him nowhere near a match for Mifune.
Verdict: “Last Man Standing” isn’t quite as bad as its reputation (it was a major flop at the time), but it mostly feels like a cast and filmmaker going through the motions. For all the handsome production value involved it can’t hold a candle to the deliriously entertaining “Yojimbo” — the latter might not be Kurosawa’s deepest and richest film, but it might be his most fun.
Bonus Round: Of course, not to bury the lead, “Yojimbo” inspired another action classic: Sergio Leone’s breakthrough “A Fistful Of Dollars.” In that case, however, the Italian helmer just ripped off the story after failing to get the remake rights, resulting in a lawsuit that held up the film’s U.S. release for three years. It might have been unethical, but Leone’s Spaghetti Western classic, starring Clint Eastwood, is a much better attempt to capture the spirit of the original than Hill’s official remake, which feels even more redundant as a result. “Yojimbo” also inspired the David Carradine-starring sword-and-sorcery flick, “The Warrior And The Sorceress,” for better or worse (mostly worse).
Original: “Wings Of Desire” (Wim Wenders, 1987)
Remake: “City Of Angels” (Brad Silberling, 1998)
Realizing that sappy 1998 Nicolas Cage/Meg Ryan weepie “City Of Angels” was based on Wim Wenders’ “Wings Of Desire” is a bit like discovering that “The Notebook” is a remake of “Eraserhead.” Well, perhaps not in such strong terms, but the 1980s German original — one of Wenders’ best-known pictures — and the American remake seem to share so little with each other that you wonder why they bothered to get the rights at all. Wenders’ picture, which won him Best Director at Cannes, and is dedicated to Ozu, Truffaut, and Tarkovsky, is set in Berlin (before the Wall came down, lest we forget) and loosely follows angels Damiel (Bruno Ganz) and Cassiel (Otto Sander) as they wander the city listening to the thoughts of the city’s inhabitants, until Damiel falls in love with a lonesome trapeze artist who dreams of immortality (Solveig Donmartin). Oh, and Peter Falk (as himself) is in town: it turns out he also was once an angel, though he’s now an actor making a film about Berlin under the Nazis. It’s a strange, singular picture, a sort of tone poem on Berlin’s place in the world — what it once was, and what it could become — while also touching on elements of mortality, humanity, and the existence of a higher power (or higher powers). It’s captured in stunning black-and-white by veteran cinematographer Henri Alekan (who shot Cocteau’s “La Belle et la Bete”), and though it’s sometimes a little precious, it’s something truly gorgeous. Unsurprisingly, “City Of Angels,” from “Caspar” director Silberling, only keeps the angel-human romance element, with Cage’s angel Seth looking over, and falling for, principle doctor Maggie (Ryan). It’s a sickly bastardization of Wenders’ picture, anaemic and insipid, with very little sense of place, despite the LA reference of the title, and overall it’s scarcely recognizable as descending from its source material, although we get Dennis Franz as a rough surrogate for Falk’s character, and Silberling has an occasionally interesting eye. Unsurprisingly, it made roughly a hundred times more at the box office than Wenders’ movie did.
Verdict: “Wings Of Desire” is a heart-stoppingly beautiful black-and-white picture that serves as a perfect time-capsule of the time and place it was made, and has a late scene at a Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds concert. “City Of Angels” has a scene where Meg Ryan rides a bike with her eyes closed and is promptly and deservedly run over by a truck.
Bonus Round: While nowhere near as tin-eared, Wenders proved that he himself was maybe not equal to the task of revisitng the “Wings of Desire” world either when he made the disappointing sequel, “Faraway So Close,” in which Falk, Saner, Ganz, and Donmartin all return, to greatly lesser effect, and the poetry of the original is replaced by patience-testing stretches of languor.