With all due respect to Spike Lee, his Oldboy was nothing but a piss-poor facsimile of the original. It's never a good sign when the filmmaker has to point out all the subtle ways that they diverted from the source material. William Friedkin's Sorcerer on the other hand, is what a remake is supposed to look like. Other than the image of a woman on her knees washing the floor, hardly any visual cues from The Wages of Fear were carried over to this re-imagining. While Clouzot was content to simply make an intimate film about greed and desperation, Friedkin saw fit to open things up and add geopolitical implications on top of everything. To use music as an analogue, this is akin to when Issac Hayes took the wonderful three minute pop song "Walk on By" and turned it into an awesome twelve minute funk epic. And through some sort of cinematic alchemy, Friedkin was able to do all of this in a shorter run-time than the original! The resultant film is a compact yet epic adventure story filled with tension that also packs a bite.
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