Len Wiseman Wants to Ruin Good Things by Remaking 'Total Recall'

Total Recall is one of my favorite movies, a hyper-violent, tongue-in-cheek sci-fi action movie that starts with people having fake vacation memories implanted in their brains and concludes with a man's mutant conjoined twin crawling out of his stomach to tell Arnold Schwarzenegger some important exposition. Like Robocop and Starship Troopers, Total Recall is the perfect merging of director Paul Verhoeven's sensibilities: plenty of boobs and gore on the outside, but a strong core of satire and intelligence.

That's why it irks me that they're remaking Total Recall...a modern big-budget take on the material wouldn't have the nerve to go where Verhoeven was willing to go in the original. At best, we'd get a vanilla action movie. Len Wiseman stepping into the director's chair seems to confirm this.

As a human being, Len Wiseman's greatest accomplishment has been scooping Kate Beckinsale off the Hot and Single list. I'd be hard-pressed to name his second greatest accomplishment, because his filmography consists of two Underworld movies and Live Free or Die Hard. Don't get me wrong, all of Wiseman's films are competently directed, the man's no technical slouch, they just have the nasty habit of being boring and/or stupid.
I'm not opposed to remakes on principle and I think I've grown up enough to not get physically enraged when someone remakes a film I love, but I strongly believe that if you are going to do dabble in the remake business, your goal should be to take the story in a new, original direction. The only way to remake Total Recall is to out-do Total Recall. I just don't think Wiseman has the skill set to do that.