25 Movie Remakes that you didn't know you wanted: ACTION COMEDIES

Die Hard is the archetype for all modern action movies, pitting ordinary people against diabolical villains in impossible survival situations. That film also gave us the pinnacle of humor mixed against the backdrop of the life-or-death action. Keeping these archetypes in mind, here are five movies from the past that I think would make outstanding action comedies as 21^st Century remakes. (Also, no one ever gets to remake the original Die Hard. Don’t mess with perfection.)

Cannonball Run

For those of you who never saw this, it was one of several Burt Reynold/Dom DeLuise movies from the late seventies. The premise is simple…it’s a cross-country car race with a big prize at the end, and an all-star cast of celebrity actors drive souped-up cars. I would approach a remake like a combination of the Fast and Furious movies crossed with It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and have classic duos like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito driving against modern actors such as Seth Rogan and James Franco (stoned, of course). Make the race an NYC to LA affair with $100 million prize for the winners, but the sponsor is a Donald Trump-style swindler who will stop at nothing to prevent ANY of the teams from finishing within the time limit, because he doesn’t really have that much money to pay.

F/X

Today is a great time to update this little gem from the eighties…a movie special effects artist (Bryan Brown) is hired by government officials to publicly fake the death of a mob boss turned informant (Jerry Orbach), only to find out he’s been double-crossed and targeted for death himself. He teams up with a salty detective (Brian Dennehy) who’s been trying to arrest the mob boss for years. You could even keep the basic script, just update the actors and really pump up the special effects tricks. This was a good movie that most people never saw; it would make a really super “mismatched buddies” flick.

The Gauntlet

One of my favorite Clint Eastwood movies, he stars as a renegade detective set up by his corrupt boss to be killed while escorting a witness (Sondra Locke, his girlfriend at the time) to testify in court. Basically everyone, both cops and criminals, tries to kill the two of them, who hook up in a steamy romance along the way. If you wanted to play this up more for laughs, cast real-life awesome couple Dax Shepard and Kristen Bell.

Sharky's Machine

Another overlooked gem from Burt Reynold’s career, this is a gritty cop drama that could be updated with a bit more “48 Hours” style humor with the right casting, especially with the supporting roles. Here’s the plot summary from IMDB: “Tom Sharky is a narcotics cop in Atlanta who's demoted to vice after a botched bust. In the depths of this lowly division, while investigating a high-dollar prostitution ring, Sharky stumbles across a mob murder with government ties, and responds by assembling his downtrodden fellow investigators (Sharky's ‘Machine’) to find the leaders and bring them to justice before they kill off all his partners and witnesses, including Sharky himself.” Now tell me that wouldn’t make a great remake with an A-list cast…maybe Clooney or Pitt in the lead role with Oceans 11 director Steven Soderbergh directing?

Smokey and the Bandit

Now, wait a minute, and hear me out…

For those of us old enough to remember the late seventies, this classic car-chase comedy starring Burt Reynolds, Jackie Gleason, Sally Field, and Jerry Reed is wonderful in every way. I’m not making that argument. But so much has changed in forty years, and a star-studded remake might be as huge as the original. Coors beer is no longer illegal in the eastern U.S., but guess what’s legal in Colorado that’s not so much in many southern states? Yup, Willie Nelson’s wacky tobaccky! So you cast Matthew McConaughey as Bandit, David Harbor (Stranger Things) as Sheriff Justice, Zoey Deschanel as Carrie, and country star Brad Paisley as Snowman. For extra fun, give Willie Nelson the “Big Enos” role who gives the crew its raison d’etre to get all that medicinal agricultural commodity cross-country in less than 48 hours. Cell phones replace CB radios, and get the guy who directed “Guardians of the Galaxy” to helm the project.

Doesn’t sound so crazy now, does it?