Why swapping heroes for heroines is a Top Dollar idea
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Version 0 of 1. There’s something terrifying, not to mention disquieting, about a really good lady villain. Maybe it’s the sheer rarity of genuine head honcho bad-girl types on the big screen, but the decision to gender swap the nefarious Top Dollar in upcoming comic book reboot The Crow already looks like a stroke of genius. It might, of course, just be the fact that an actor of the quality of Andrea Riseborough is in talks for the role, seemingly cast against type in a hugely intriguing proposition. I suspect hardcore fans of the 1994 original view it through somewhat rose-tinted glasses, but there’s no denying that Michael Wincott was one of the best things about the movie as the ruthless ruler of a ruined Detroit. If Riseborough turns out to be a revelation in the role, a slightly run-of-the-mill looking reboot of a film series that was never that fabulous in the first place (particularly after the first instalment) starts to look a whole lot more palatable. So which other tired old franchises could do with swapping from male to female? Here are five that couldn’t possibly ... ahem ... go wrong. Jane Bond Anyone remember the rumours that Halle Berry might be getting her own spin-off 007 series before anyone had actually seen the horrorshow represented by 2002’s Die Another Day? Frankly, producers Eon would have been better off giving the lead to Madonna’s innuendo-dispensing fencing instructor, but perhaps the idea deserves a revamp more than a decade on. Granted, the Bond series is currently on a high after the impressive critical and box-office success of 2012’s Skyfall, but in a world dominated by men wouldn’t a suave and irresistible female secret agent make a better undercover “blunt instrument” for MI6? James, much as we love him, has been a man out of time for decades: better to hand the mantle of saviour of Queen and country over to his cousin Jane (perhaps played by former Bond girl Rosamund Pike as a souped-up version of her venomous Gone Girl character given free rein via a licence to kill from Her Majesty). Blade Runner 2: Rachael’s Revenge What better way to make the upcoming Denis Villeneuve-directed sequel a genuinely thought-provoking proposition than to reverse the roles taken by Harrison Ford’s Rick Deckard and Sean Young’s Rachael in the original film? The movie could open on a reimagination of the famous “Voight-Kampff test” scene in which Deckard finally learns if he himself is a replicant. If only Young were not so ubiquitous by her absence from the big screen these days. Related: Mad Max: Fury Road's strong women won't surprise true genre fans Mad Maxine According to “men’s rights” bloggers, George Miller has already lost the entire male cinemagoing population of the western world by allowing Charlize Theron’s Imperator Furiosa to “bark orders” at Tom Hardy’s weary desert warrior in the brilliant Mad Max: Fury Road. And the Australian film-maker had already planned to centre the second instalment of his long-awaited reboot on the South African actor. So why not go one step further? The saga has a history of celebrating tough females, and you’d have to be truly crazy to survive as a lone woman in the saga’s dusty post-apocalyptic madhouse. Thor Marvel has already made the change in the comic books, revealing earlier this year that Thor’s long-term love interest Jane Foster has become the new female Thor after picking up the hammer Mjolnir and finding herself more worthy of it than the son of Odin himself. The poor old male Thor, meanwhile, has been forced to refer to himself as Thorr, which sounds rather like a dodgy Estonian metal band. Given that the big-screen version of the character struggled in his last solo outing, 2013’s Thor: The Dark World, perhaps the Disney-owned studio might do well to follow suit? It would certainly help make Taco Tuesday at Avengers Tower a bit less of a sausage fest. Transformers: Fembots in disguise Why do all movies about male robots tend to focus on blowing stuff up, while films about female robots are always to a greater or lesser extent about sex? Let’s leave that discussion to another day, but imagine a combination of the two – sort of Transformers meets Ex Machina – in which a race of giant sexy robots battles it out with another race of really mean giant sexy robots while paltry human beings look on in awe, and teenage boys (and girls) experience incredibly conflicting and disturbing sensual awakenings in the front row of the Beckenham Odeon. Bear with me: this couldn’t be worse than Michael Bay’s plan for another trilogy of synapse-smashing giant robot attack movies starring Mark Wahlberg. And any predictable “female lead washes the car-bot in skimpy clothing” scenes would suddenly get a whole lot more interesting. |