The movie that offended Goldie Hawn by existing: “I’m not a fan”
Goldie Hawn has left behind an incredible legacy within the world of comedy, and she’s earned the right to want to defend it.
Hawn has been making great films for so long that she has earned a following of fans from many different generations. While it was her breakthrough performance in Cactus Flower that earned her the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, she began to truly experience a career peak in the 1980s after teaming up with her future husband, Kurt Russell.
Although Hawn and Russell were an inseparable screen duo, Overboard was easily the best of the films that they made together, a classic slapstick comedy in the vein of the screwball films of the ‘30s, and one of the first contemporary romantic comedies to become a massive sensation. While there have been many films that have tried to replicate the same magic, the original hasn’t aged a day since its debut in 1987.
Regardless, Hollywood has never been shameless when it comes to mining their previous hits for nostalgia, with a particular affinity for the ‘80s, and considering that there were already remakes of such classic ‘80s films as Robocop, Fright Night, The Karate Kid, Footloose, Hairspray, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street, among others, it shouldn’t have come as a massive surprise that Lionsgate decided to make a new version of Overboard.
Not to say remakes aren’t inherently a bad thing, especially if they’re done well, such as the case of Steven Soderbergh’s Ocean’s Eleven, where the new version actually fleshed out the original’s story and made it more fun, or Martin Scorsese’s take on the Asian action film Infernal Affairs, in the form of The Departed, where in he changed the location and time period. Unfortunately, there was nothing that the new version of Overboard did that the original hadn’t done better, and although there were charming performances from Anna Faris and Eugenio Derbez, they had nothing on Hawn and Russell.
Occasionally, a remake will incorporate members of the previous version in order to ‘pass the torch’ from one generation to another; for example, Rita Moreno appeared in the new version of West Side Story after winning an Oscar for her performance as Maria in the 1961 original. The new Overboard didn’t ask for Hawn to return, and based on her expressed opinions on the remake, it doesn’t seem like she would have been interested.
“Overboard was really perfect just as it was,” she told Variety, “Very rarely does a remake match the actual original film. So I’m not a fan of remakes, period. I think that people have put their stamp on their movies, and if they’re classics, they should be left alone.”
The 2018 reiteration is a particularly egregious example of a remake that doesn’t do anything substantially different, and outside of gender-swapping the two leads, the narrative and beats are almost virtually identical. What’s unfortunate is that Farris and Derbez are two talented actors with comedy skills, and may have actually had chemistry if they were working on a project that was completely original.
If anything, the fact that the Overboard remake failed may have actually solidified Hawn’s reputation by proving that what she did back in 1987 couldn’t easily be replicated. Hopefully, studio executives will think twice before trying to remake her other films like The Sugarland Express, Seems Like Old Times, Shampoo, or Foul Play.
