Sequels, by their very nature, are usually inferior to the original. Some are cash-grabs, about nothing more than making money out of a successful, fresh, concept. That they fail is hardly surprising. They lack the passion and imagination of what came before; hastily made, they are more often than not re-treads of old ideas. They completely miss what made the first such a hit; the people who bought into and who wanted something new and exciting.
And if sequels are a bad idea, what even to say about remakes? They are probably the worst things imaginable. I’ve seen classics remade in ways which ought to have had studio heads run out of their offices and into forced retirement.
Remakes and sequels: both are synonymous with the word “shite.”
Is Alex McLeish 2 a remake or a sequel? Either way, it’s a dreadful failure which really ought to have stayed in somebody’s suggestion box. What we are enduring is pointless, lacking in anything exciting, moribund and a complete waste of time and money.
It was always going to be. The popcorn that usually accompanies a managerial appointment tasted decidedly stale even before the calamitous eight match run that has seen wins over lowly Albania and Hungary wedged between six defeats. Now it’s like something that was swept from under the cinema seats and boxed up all over again.
This is a movie that everyone just wants to be finished, every bit as bad as the advance reviews promised.
It might be one of the worst I’ve ever seen, and I write that as a true cinephile who might be the only person in the country who has more than once seen both The Bed That Eats and Tommy Wiseau’s notoriously honking The Room.
(Google it. Watch some of the “highlights.” I promise, it will give you nightmares that will erase the ones about Scotland’s defending. It just might be the only thing currently available on YouTube that will.)
This is not a comedy. You can forgive a comedy the kind of cringe inducing moments this has had. It is not a drama. There is nothing dramatic about watching the national team take a pummelling and be humiliated over and over again. It could qualify as a crime flick, but not for any reason the SFA wants to advertise and remind people of. No, it’s none of those. This is a horror, the sort you watch from behind the sofa.
Only the SFA could have thought bringing a has-been out of semi-retirement to put him in a prior role, where what people wanted was some future prospect, was a good idea. This wasn’t so much Harrison Ford returning for one more Star Wars as it was the ill-conceived idea (thankfully binned at the suggestion stage) of having a pensionable age Rocky Balboa fight for one last title.
The titular movie, where he fought an exhibition fight against an unsteady champion was decent enough because the stakes were low and there was no title on the line. We bought his opponent as a big headed kid who needed to find out what real courage was. We bought it because there was never any prospect that the old warhorse would win the goddamned fight.
Expecting any of us to accept this – even without the Ibrox connection being the overwhelming force moving it in the first place – was like trying to sell us on the fight, and the climax, of Rocky IV.
The idea that this guy could have gotten through an interview process, far less made a success of this job, was even more ludicrous than the concept that Rocky could survive even one of Drago’s punches, coming at two thousand one hundred and fifty pounds of pressure per square inch … a Great White Shark bite comes in it at roughly a quarter of that, if you want a Real Life comparison.
This appointment has never sat right with most of us.
It was a move born of utter desperation and a willingness from the SFA to pander to the Sevco fans who had stopped watching when Strachan was appointed boss.
It was a calculated insult to the rest of us, though, both those who hailed from the Celtic fraternity and anyone who didn’t fancy a guy who had walked out and left the nation in the lurch before being handed the gig as an act of charity.
And it has gone just as the doubters thought it would; it’s been a colossal failure on every level and all we can hope for now is that they won’t drag it out. Eight games, two wins, six defeats. It is surely obvious to all involved that this one is doomed.
Defending it is an exercise in futility and will only waste everyone’s time.
The conclusion is obvious, the destination certain, so what are people waiting for? The technical term for this is “a bomb” as in, “it has bombed at the box office.” All that remains is to pull it from the theatres and forget about it as quickly as possible.
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