The Wrong Good Friday

"Look, you tosser. British gangster films, right? Some people fink the genre is tired and cliched. Maybe they're right.

But, however bored you are of it, there's somefin you oughta get in ya thick bonce. There's some solid gold classics out there, alwight? Whatever you think of "Guy" Ritchie and the latest stuff this country 'as been churnin' aaat, everyone loves Get Carter. Its like a British version of the blaaddy Spaghetti Westerns. Villain from the seventies? Thats blaady good too. And some of the modern ones - Sexy Beast and that lot. Classics, they are.

Anotha fing: some of these old gangster films... watchin' them is like watchin' a period fackin' drama. Take The Long Good Friday, f'rinstance. Thirty years old that is. Its like a blaady Jane Austen novel. Get Carter is even olda. The era, right, the blaady time the film is set... its like a second character. Whateva it is, the 60s, the 70s or the 80s, these films are products of their fackin' era and that's all part of the charm. Got it?"

Today, I read this.

There's probably about seven million websites and blogs out in the ether, bemoaning Hollywood's obsession with remakes. Probably half of them attempt to - at least in part - justify the obsession by saying "but The Maltese Falcon was a remake!" Etc, etc.

There are also a great deal of websites complaining about how Hollywood has to take British films and relocate them to America or make all the characters American.

The Ladykillers, The Italian Job, Get Carter...

Internet pleas to - for God's sake - leave the old films alone probably do as much good as pissing on the fires of damnation.

Even so, I have to say that the decision to remake The Long Good Friday strikes me as utterly silly and, essentially, illogical.

I mean, the film is interesting in a number of ways. I don't know if you've seen it but compared to, say, Get Carter, it doesn't seem to get nearly as much praise/acclaim these days. However, to my mind, its just as much a classic.

The best gangster films, bar none, are character studies. The Godfather, Goodfellas and Scarface: these are films about how crime and violence effects the protagonist. How it seduces them and changes them and, generally, how it leads to their downfall.

The Long Good Friday is the same but its, well, without sounding arrogant, I think it deals with Bob Hoskins' character - Harold - in a way only a British film really could. There is something so subtle, deft and ambiguous in the way his character and his actions are held under the microscope, the intensity of his performance has a completely different undercurrent to it than, say, Pacino in Scarface.

"Judge Doom don't faaakin' scare me."

Harold is a hopelessly flawed character: a gangster who had his heyday twenty years before, he yearns for the time when people could leave their backdoors open and the docklands were a powerful monument to British industry. At the heart of the character, is this ambition to give something back. Something historic to restore pride to his home. He is racist and brutal yet strangely likable. Yet, compared to the smooth representatives of the mafia that he tries to schmooze over the course of the weekend, the film shows just how laughably backward he is.

The times have changed and Harold is a relic, a dinosaur, like so many other middle-aged white men of the time (and even now) who wish Britain was Great again.

Put it this way, the first atrocity that is committed against him and his organisation over the course of the film is someone trying to blow up his mum while she's at church. There's something inherently comic in his reaction.

"MY MUM?!"

Everything about the film pulses, no, aches with the era. Thatcherism, the beleaguered state of the docks, the IRA... the presence of, among others, a young Pierce Brosnan and Charlie (Charlie!) from Casualty in early roles... this a film that is specific to London and, even more importantly, specific to the time.

If, in remaking a film, you essentially have to change every single element of the original, calling it a remake at all seems to me just a cynical way to get some more press exposure and guarantee a few more bums in seats when its eventually released.

A more honest approach would be to drop the term "remake" entirely and craft an original film set in America that deals with similar thematic issues. How times are changing, how the golden age of gangsterism has passed. You can even set it over a single day and show some other, more forward thinking organisation sweeping the main character aside (the inclusion of terrorists would probably be a bad idea). That main protagonist can even be a ridiculous relic of a bygone era.

But it would not be The Long Good Friday. A little "Inspired By" credit at the start would be the only necessary connection.

Maybe Martin Scorsese could do such an idea justice. Even then, he'd probably just ladle in loads of swearing, double the number of male characters just so even more people can die and halve the screen time of Harold's wife.

But, seriously, Paul W.S. Anderson? Director of this and this.

"Hi! I'm Uwe Boll only blander!"

The man whose only achievement is the cinematic exorcism of suspense from established franchises?

Fack off.

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Jachap is not from the East End of London.