Steven Spielberg has recently cast Bradley Cooper to play the titular renegade cop in his upcoming Bullitt reboot. While fans are skeptical that Cooper can top the iconic performance given by Steve McQueen in the original movie, action-adventure reboots aren’t always worse than their predecessors.
Some beloved action heroes have been even more compelling in the reboot, like Tom Hardy’s Max Rockatansky in Mad Max: Fury Road or Jeff Bridges’ Rooster Cogburn in the Coen brothers’ remake of True Grit.
10 Batman (Batman Begins)
After the over-the-top campness of Batman & Robin nearly killed the franchise altogether, Christopher Nolan swooped in to reinvent the superhero genre with the gritty realism of Batman Begins. This movie imagined the Dark Knight myth in a familiar real-world setting.
Christian Bale made Bruce Wayne a more complex and nuanced character than ever before with his multi-dimensional portrayal of an orphaned billionaire who takes the law into his own hands.
9 Max Rockatansky (Mad Max: Fury Road)
Mel Gibson gave a terrific performance as the softly spoken titular post-apocalyptic warrior in George Miller’s Mad Max trilogy. But Tom Hardy offered an even more stoic and compelling turn as the character in Mad Max: Fury Road.
Miller stepped up the vehicular carnage in Fury Road, and the focus on Furiosa brought out the most interesting part of Max’s character: he’s a lone wolf who traverses the wasteland and helps people in need.
8 Rooster Cogburn (True Grit)
John Wayne subverted his clean-cut on-screen western hero image with the revisionist action of True Grit. As a hard-drinking, morally ambiguous gunslinger, U.S. Marshal Reuben J. “Rooster” Cogburn is the opposite of every other character Wayne played.
When the Coen brothers remade the movie, they made Cogburn an even more grizzled and mysterious antihero and refocused the story on Mattie Ross, the main character of the source material.
7 Captain Kirk (Star Trek)
William Shatner became a globally recognized icon with his turn as Captain James T. Kirk in the original Star Trek series, but his limited acting abilities coasted by on his limitless charm. Chris Pine played the part with both charm and nuance in J.J. Abrams’ Trek reboot.
The 2009 reboot goes back to Kirk’s early career, detailing how he met Bones, how he met Spock, and how he became such a respected Starfleet captain in the first place.
6 Spider-Man (Spider-Man: Homecoming)
Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield both gave terrific performances as Peter Parker, but Tom Holland managed to outdo them both in the context of a densely populated Marvel universe in Spider-Man: Homecoming. Director Jon Watts told Spidey’s first solo MCU story as a John Hughes-style high school comedy.
Spidey’s conversations with the A.I. that Tony Stark fitted into his high-tech suit allowed Watts to translate the thought bubbles from the comic books – crucial to his characterization and inner conflicts – to the screen.
5 James Bond (Casino Royale)
The James Bond franchise gets rebooted every few years with a new actor and a new stylistic approach. Daniel Craig, the sixth actor to take on the role of 007 in the official Eon canon, managed to top the iconic work of his predecessors with the grittiest and most realistic take on Bond to date.
Martin Campbell’s Casino Royale is a captivating, emotionally charged origin story for Bond, detailing the backstory of his 00 status, his license to kill, and his cold-heartedness.
4 Paul Atreides (Dune)
David Lynch’s original film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune was praised for its trippy visuals, but it suffered from having to condense the entire novel into a single feature film. Denis Villeneuve cut the novel in half for his own movie adaptation, which allowed him to spend longer building out the world and developing the characters.
Amidst the futuristic, psychedelic spectacle of Villeneuve’s direction, Timothée Chalamet played Paul Atreides as an angsty adolescent who’s easy to identify with.
3 Lieutenant Vincent Hanna (Heat)
Michael Mann remade his own movie for the better with Heat, the first on-screen pairing of the legendary acting talents of Al Pacino and Robert De Niro. The movie is a thrilling cat-and-mouse caper in which Pacino plays a narrow-minded LAPD cop and De Niro plays the successful bank robber he’s determined to take down.
Unsurprisingly, Pacino gave a much more riveting and multifaceted performance as Vincent Hanna than his predecessor Scott Plank in the made-for-TV original, L.A. Takedown.
2 The Hulk (The Avengers)
Three different actors have played the Hulk in a big-screen big-budget blockbuster. Eric Bana brought the character to the screen before the MCU, Edward Norton introduced the character to the MCU, and Mark Ruffalo took the baton from there.
Ruffalo’s Bruce Banner has been relegated to comic relief in most of his MCU appearances, but his Hulk debut in The Avengers struck the perfect balance between fun superhero action and nuanced Jekyll-and-Hyde psycho-drama.
1 Judge Dredd (Dredd)
The first Judge Dredd movie woefully mischaracterized the iconic totalitarian antihero. He was a noble lawman who kept taking off his helmet to banter with his comedic sidekick. Karl Urban righted those wrongs with a much gruffer and more brutal portrayal of Dredd than Sylvester Stallone’s turn.
In the beautifully self-contained dystopian thriller Dredd, the titular judge, jury, and executioner is paired with a naive rookie, a la Dirty Harry and Kate Moore in The Enforcer.
