ANNIE: Yet Another Pointless Remake

In an era when Hollywood is running out of ideas more than any other previous point in its century-long history, the big studios’ desire to unnecessarily remake everything grows even more unwelcome. It’s not that good remakes can’t be made (after all, The Departed, The Fly and a Fistful of Dollars all exist), but modern audiences are so skeptical of remakes that they tend to stay away in droves.

The remakes only seem to happen presumably so that the studios can maintain the copyright to the originals and continue to make heaps of money. Yet in the past couple of years, remakes of Conan the Barbarian, Footloose, Oldboy, Robocop and many more have proven themselves to be costly box office flops, with no real reason to exist outside of making sure the studios maintain rights to the brand. The latest remake of Annie is all but certain to join those movies on the list of films giving the accountants of Hollywood sleepless nights.

Here, little orphan Annie is living with a vaguely-abusive stepmother (played awfully by Cameron Diaz) in Harlem, which is portrayed here in a way that sidesteps the real life poverty of many of the real neighbourhoods because, hey, this is a kids film and we don’t need to depress them about life. Diaz’ character only adopts kids in order to get welfare money from the state – an element which is routinely ignored despite being a good source for some biting comedy.

One day while walking home to this life of not-really-that-miserable misery, Annie is saved from being run over by multi-millionaire Benjamin Stacks (Jamie Foxx, continuing the downward spiral of his career), a technology mogul hoping to run for mayor of New York despite hating literally everybody. Seeing this as a good opportunity to get the voters to like him, his PR team ensures that Annie sticks around long enough to help his campaign, and she in turn asks for him to adopt her.

Great Cast, Bad Movie

In this latest iteration of Annie, our heroine is played by Beasts of the Southern Wild actress Quvenzhané Wallis, who made history by becoming the youngest actress to gain a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her breakout role. Her performance in that movie had an infectious charm, landing her in the small group of child actors who aren’t remotely annoying. To its credit, nothing in Annie removes any goodwill towards this most promising of child stars, as she does her best to make the character at least likable. But in this version of the story Annie is so bland that it becomes a mystery as to why anybody would ever find her interesting. I understand that we have to suspend our disbelief when watching a kids film, but how could a child with no discerning qualities become an A-list celebrity with over a million followers on Twitter? After all, the only significant thing she did was not get run over by a truck.

Yet even though the movie is something of a misfire (to say the least), the casting of Wallis in the title role is a no-brainer. She just hasn’t been given the right material to make us care about the character, whilst the movie itself is too overly-referential to previous versions of the story. The reason we don’t fully get to know her character is presumably because we are expected to know all about her already. The first shot of the movie, for example, is of a red-haired girl named Annie speaking to her elementary school class, who then sits down to be replaced by the “new and improved” Annie. Like most sane people, I get very annoyed at portions of the internet who get angry when a non-white actor or actress is cast in the role of a fictitious character. Yet by opening up the movie like this, all it does is make the viewer want to watch older versions of the story, rather than serving its intention as a humorous transition into the new remake.

A musical where you are left begging for the songs to end

This new remake is produced by none other than Jay-Z, which suggests that the musical soundtrack would have a distinctive feel, with memorable songs that successfully update the classics in a way that doesn’t tarnish the memory of the original. After all, one of Jay-Z’s first singles was a gangsta rap cover of “Hard Knock Life.” Surely he was brought on board as producer to ensure the film got equally successful modernizations of the entire soundtrack? Yet, it instead feels limp and lifeless. The covers of the original songs don’t hold candles to the original cast recordings, and the new songs are bland to the point that they practically vaporize into thin air moments after their performances are finished. If anybody wants an argument as to why the Golden Globes are useless, look no further than the Best Original Song nomination bestowed upon “Opportunity,” a song I had to search for on YouTube just to remember how it sounded. Clearly, the A-list connections the movie has (and the great red carpet opportunity this will afford the Globes) are the only reason it got any nominations, much like the Christina Aguilera-starring disasterpiece Burlesque a few years ago.

The reason Annie doesn’t work successfully as a musical is due to the fact that performances of songs aren’t recorded in one single take. In the 1950’s classic Singin’ in the Rain, the performance of the title song is all done in one take, giving the feel of a real live performance of the song. In Annie, on the other hand, the camera keeps cutting away to different performers who are all evidently lip-syncing. The performances don’t FEEL real, they feel heavily stage-managed to get the right angle of whoever is singing. This is made even more jarring in the scene after Cameron Diaz sings a solo number (sample lyric: “little girls, I eat sleep and breathe them”- sounding not too dissimilar from the opening song in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelhpia’s musical The Nightman Cometh), when afterwards a neighbour shouts down from the street how much he enjoyed listening to it. In the reality of the film, people naturally break into song repeatedly, yet at another point they express how much they wish their life was like a musical. Director Will Gluck, who is best known for the raunchy comedies Easy A and Friends with Benefits, is given a comparatively ambitious project like a musical (and a family friendly one at that), yet he seems like a poor directorial choice, as he visibly struggles to handle the material successfully.

Moments where Gluck relies on the comedic detours he’s known for (many of which consist of dated pop-culture references) are the biggest misfires in the movie. A film-within-a-film featuring his Friends with Benefits star Mila Kunis is presumably intended to be a gag at the expense of Hollywood’s terrible ideas of late. But he has also credited the movie to Lego Movie/ Jump Street directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, presumably as a gag in reference to how redundant the concepts to their movies seem on paper. These two directors, though, have a talent of making projects that sound terrible into must-sees. After all, at the time of writing, their movie about Danish building blocks is the biggest box office hit of the year in the UK. If they helmed Annie, these self-referential elements would still be there, but they would also be funny and equally appreciated by both young and old audiences.

In a nutshell, Annie isn’t a complete disappointment, purely because expectations were low to begin with. Every time it seems that Hollywood may finally be winding down with their producing of endless unnecessary remakes, a movie like Annie comes along to remind us just how creatively bankrupt the mainstream movie industry remains. At the very least, kids and adults will be entertained equally, by which I mean they will be equally un-entertained.

Annie is released on the 19th December in the US and the 26th December in the UK. All international release dates can be found right here.

Did you think differently about Annie? What’s the most pointless Hollywood remake of recent years?

(top image source: Sony Pictures)