Sorcerer (1977)

For its first 20 to 30 minutes you wouldn't know that 1977's Sorcerer is in fact a remake of the French produced 1953 masterpiece The Wages of Fear.  Both films are about a group of desperate expatriates who take on the dangerous job of transporting volatile nitroglycerin over hundreds of kilometers of rough roads in a never named Latin American country. However the beginnings of Sorcerer wants to give you detailed backstories for our leads, something Wages of Fear doesn't bother with. So you have assassinations, terrorists attacks, bank fraud and armed robbery before our four principal characters start to interact with each other in a sweltering banana republic. Interestingly while I know much more about the characters in Sorcerer, I actually cared about the characters in Wages of Fear far more.

While this latter films does a few things arguably better then its predecessor, such as explain how the nitroglycerin is insulated against road turbulence, and the way one particular road obstacle is blown up, on the whole it is a far less interesting film, because it is a far less tense one. Now part of this is because I've seen this story before, and while its not a strict beat per beat remake even in the trucking scenes, it sticks mostly close to the original. But part of this also has to do with the way the thing was mounted. There is a sequence where they take the trucks over a bridge that is so ridiculously rickety you would never dare try to drive a truck over it because you would surely die. I mean it just looked ridicules and took me right out of the movie. On paper remaking Wages of Fear sounds like a great idea, but in practice, even with a serviceable cast (highlighted by Roy Scheider, 2 years off Jaws) and an expert like William Friedkin (The French Connection, The Exorcist) helming the thing it was still just a pale imitation. Oh and 'Sorcerer' is the name of one of the trucks, so that's where the stupid title comes from. **