Despite similarities in titles, this weekend's new release Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is not a remake of the 1992 movie Bad Lieutenant. But it's also not the case of two films that happen to share a name, as with Spellbound, which is both a 1945 Hitchcock thriller and a 2002 documentary about a spelling bee. (Calling that one Bee Movie would have made for even more confusion.)
"Re-imagining" comes close, although Edward R. Pressman, who produced both films and is the only human link in the chain between them, calls it a "revisiting." Both feature a police lieutenant (Harvey Keitel in the original; Nicolas Cage in the new one) and both lieutenants are bad, but that's where the similarity ends.
This raises the question: Why play the same-name game at all? Most likely it's because in a crowded cinemascape a film needs all the brand power it can muster. Bad Lieutenant is one of six new films in Toronto this weekend, sharing marquee space with Planet 51, The Blind Side, Mary and Max and a little number called New Moon. It's not even first in the long-winded title department; that honour goes to Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire.
The first Bad Lieutenant may not be that well remembered, though it did win an early Independent Spirit Award for Keitel. But moviegoers will likely recall something familiar about the title, which might be just the tipping point it needs to beat The Men Who Stare at Goats.
Films are forever jostling for this kind of recognition. TV spots remind potential viewers of the accolades of the stars. (I always feel bad for the third-tier actors, though, when a trailer crows: "Academy Award winner Meryl Streep, Academy Award nominee Amy Adams ... and Chris Messina.") Trailers tell us that a new movie is from the guy who wrote, directed or even just paid for a well-known film.
A good parallel to Bad Lieutenant's brand of "remember me?" is Quentin Tarantino's recent hit Inglourious Basterds. It took the title and rough outline of a 1978 spaghetti war movie - The Inglorious Bastards was itself a cheap knockoff of The Dirty Dozen - and remade it with better actors and worse spelling. It's the kind of recycling that Tarantino does better than almost anyone else.
Drawing inspiration from the ghost of movies past seems to be gaining in popularity. Last Christmas gave us The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which borrowed the title and ageing-in-reverse conceit from a 1921 short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald. But many critics pointed out that the story was basically Forrest Gump told backward. (Eric Roth wrote both screenplays.)
In the summer, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra appropriated the name of the 1960s action figure - itself christened after a popular 1945 film, The Story of G.I. Joe - for a fairly generic plot about world domination. Though impossible to calculate, at least some of the film's US$150-million box office (it scored just 36% at rottentomatoes.com) had to be a direct result of brand recognition. Calling it just The Rise of Cobra might have sliced US$50-million from its profits. Renaming it Transformers: The Rise of Cobra could have had the opposite effect, particularly among the "I'd watch Megan Fox in anything" crowd.
Upcoming movies continue to borrow liberally from well-known franchises. Next summer brings us Marmaduke the movie, with Owen Wilson as the voice of the slobbery Great Dane from the single-panel comic strip. Recently it was announced that Sony Pictures had purchased the rights to the board game Risk. Peter Berg (The Kingdom, Hancock) is making a film version of Battleship for release in 2011, and no less a directing talent than Ridley Scott is said to be working on Monopoly.
As with Bad Lieutenant, board-game movies are unlikely to bear anything beyond name resemblance to their predecessors. And if Port of Call New Orleans does well, its producer might want to consider expanding the concept to other movies. Imagine Samuel L. Jackson as a drug-addled Jedi in Star Wars: Port of Call Tatooine. I'd watch that, and I don't even have a clue what it's about.
