The 5 Most Pointless Movie Adaptations of TV Shows

We have to admit, the huge success of The Simpsons movie leaves us conflicted. We liked the movie, but hate the fact that its box office has guaranteed about 150 more slap-together TV show remakes over the next few years. We don't need to remind you of the track record these movies have "¦ but we're going to anyway.

Here' the worst of the worst:

#5.
The Dukes of Hazzard

The Dukes of Hazzard remake is the manual our descendants will consult when they want to understand how to utterly destroy a treasured memory. It's hard to pity an inanimate object, but after 90 minutes of this painful "comedy" you start planning ways to rescue the General Lee. Plus, a movie that makes the experience of watching Jessica Simpson in denim cut-offs anything other than awesome is doing something terribly wrong. You can't blame Simpson for being a terrible actress; she reacts the way any modern 'starlet' does when faced with something she can't do: by taking off her clothes and soaping herself with sudsy water. It' as if Simpson believes the mere sight of titties will distract the male mind from any criticism and focus purely on the titties instead, which is a titties titties of titties. Titties titties, titties, titties. Titties, titties, titties.

The Alleged Improvement: Johnny Knoxville
The original Duke brothers were the embodiment of camaraderie. In Luke, Bo literally had a cousin, a friend, a brother and a devoted husband. The Jackass crew, on the other hand, laugh when their friends injure themselves, as well as when they are gluing their own pubes to their "friend'" face. So, if the word "friendship" makes you think of a member of Jackass then we hate to break it you, but you were bullied to pieces as a child. The original Luke and Bo pulled off the greatest television scene ever with a jumping car, a bow and a stick of dynamite tied to an arrow. Anybody handing Johnny Knoxville an explosive-tipped projectile had better be ready with a bomb disposal expert, a flashlight and the world' bravest proctologist.

#4.
Charlie' Angels: Full Throttle

Charlie' Angels: Full Throttle single-handedly saves the first Charlie' Angels film from appearing on this list, by virtue of being a horrendous sequel to an awful remake of a terrible '70s TV show. The original TV show survived in the dark days before the Internet when men were prepared to sit through 30 minutes of lame karate chops because the leading ladies thought 'bra' was just something frat boys call each other. These days you can't get through a shampoo commercial without at least side boob. And with the Internet, you can choose four pornographic words at random and find a site dedicated explicitly to that, and also that with goats. Like the rare Betamax-eating Dodo, the ecological niche of this show has disappeared.

Alleged Improvement: Cameron Diaz! Lucy Liu! Drew Barrymore!
Sexy women from the modern era where 'hairstyling' doesn't mean sticking your head in a blender full of mousse! Surely, they'll be better than three '70s actresses who looked like they'd just finished filming a porno with the male members of ABBA. The downside is that modern big names have rights, piles of money and legal teams who can file "Breach of Contract" paperwork just by thinking about it. Thus, the exact boundaries of how much silky actress skin could be shown were more strictly defined and carefully guarded than North Korea's borders. Once the critical component of 'casually jiggling' is removed from Charlie' Angels all you're left with is the plot. We could write a better plot by sticking a pen and paper in a tub of Jell-O and shaking it around. Or have Drew Barrymore write it with the pen wedged between her titties. But, don't let that image detract from the sheer fact that titties titties deficient in the sense that titties, titties, titties. Titties, titties, titties, titties? Titties.

PS: If you ever replace Bill Murray with Bernie Mac, you'd better be doing some kind of Schindler' List thing where you're saving good comedians in a dark, totalitarian comic-killing future. No offense to fans of "Man-that-guy-talks-in-a-funny-way!" humor, but damn, that shit is whack.

#3.
Bewitched

Pretty simple, really. You have an actor, Will Ferrell, starring in a movie adaptation of a TV show, in which he plays an actor, who in the movie is set to star in a TV adaptation of the same TV show the movie is an adaptation of. There are so many levels of meta here we're surprised that half way through the movie they didn't replace Will Ferrell with Will Arnett.

We'll never know how many writers or rewrites that script went through before they arrived at this one. We're going to guess it happened after about the 25th revision, at about three in the morning, right after the writer had a nervous breakdown. Maybe this script is what he did instead of climbing up in a tower with a rifle.

Alleged Improvement: Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman
That' right, she wins the Oscar in 2002 and by 2005 she' starring in a remake about a remake of a show America forced off the air in 1972. We're trying to figure out at what stage this project still seemed like a good idea, and we're thinking it was about half a second after her agent said the words, "Nicole, we're looking at a project with Will Ferrell. It' ..."

#2.
Miami Vice

On paper, you could go in a couple of different directions with a Miami Vice movie and come out the other end with a decent flick. In the spirit of the Brady Bunch Movie, you could celebrate the dated kitschy-ness that embodied the original TV counterpart and make a pretty funny movie that puts Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx in dangerously bright Armani jackets. Conversely, you could take already established characters and make a fairly decent buddy-cop, action flick. Going in a third direction, you could be Michael Mann and shit all over the iconic TV show that you, yourself, created by sticking two, ego-driven superstars with no business appearing in a film together and top it off with your interesting-to-no-one-but-you style of dark, in-your-face filmmaking.

Alleged Improvement: Adding grit
People generally remember two things about the show Miami Vice: ridiculous, now-hilarious pastel suit jackets, and the warm, sometimes homoerotic, chemistry between Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas. Not only were the pastels removed, but thanks to Michael Mann' "style," the entire movie was so fucking dark and gritty, you could barely tell who was Crockett and who was Tubbs. Speaking of whom, the reassuring "buddy" feel that accompanied the show was completely absent from the movie Vice, and you got the impression that Farrell and Foxx genuinely hated each other. They didn't enjoy one another' company on screen and rarely made eye contact. You half expected them to turn their guns on each other. Not that you'd know which cop to root for if it did come down to that, as there was zero character development and the whole thing looked like it was shot through a rusty window screen.
#1.
Transformers

Transformers are giant kickass robots that fight and blow up things, then transform into awesome vehicles that also fight and blow up things. The 1986 animated movie makes up a fair fraction of the soul of everyone who was a boy at the time. It takes hard work to screw up that concept, but as Street Fighter and House of the Dead have proven, some directors are prepared to work extremely hard when their Dark Lord, Who Is Satan commands them. Watching Optimus Prime prancing around the house for a nerd who can't command a chihuahua with a broken leg? It's like watching your dad get beaten up at a softball game. We're not saying Michael Bay turned the '80s icons of awesomeness into a bunch of retarded, grunting dumbasses out for cheap laughs but, well, there was that one scene where Bumblebee pissed on a guy so we guess we are saying that.

Sure, the movie made a billion dollars at the box office. The commercials were awesome, and how were we supposed to know it was bad if we didn't actually go see it? Twice?

Alleged Improvement: Focusing on puny humans instead of the giant incredible wondrous Robots in Disguise.
As you may detect, we consider that a mistake. There are only a few things humans can do that robots can't, fewer that normal people want to watch, and none that you can show in a kids' movie. After the human-centric Transformers and the disaster that was Pearl Harbor, you have to ask yourself: Does Michael Bay miss the point so spectacularly as a statement, or is it some kind of medical condition? Is he this off-point in daily life? Does he need someone to help him aim at the urinal? In any event, we've prepared this simple test: Michael, if you're making a movie about GIANT TRANSFORMING ROBOTS, and less than one-third of the movie actually contains GIANT TRANSFORMING ROBOTS, you may have made a mistake.