Let Me In Avoids Curse of the Awful Foreign Film Remake, Still Tanks
Everyone should see Let the Right One In, the 2008 Swedish horror flick about a child vampire. But if you are illiterate and can't read subtitles, it looks like the American remake, Let Me In isn't half bad.
Earlier we worried that Matt Reeve's Let me In, starring Kickass' Chloe Grace Moretz as a 12-year-old vampire , would be a classic hacky American remake of a great foreign film. Not so, say critics!
The Times' A.O. Scott calls it "eerily fascinating... at once artful and unpretentious, more interested in intimacy and implication than in easy scares or slick effects." And TIME's Mary F. Pois says "Let Me In is not as fantastic as Let the Right One In... but it is undeniably powerful and made with obvious admiration and respect for the source material." The movie currently has a respectable 86% on the Tomatometer.
But it's tanking at the box office, with just $5 million in ticket sales projected for its opening weekend, compared to The Social Network's $26.9 million. So, there you go: People do not go for slightly-worse-than-the-original remakes of foreign films.