Must they do this?

Wrapping day — which means not only paper cuts galore, but an all-you-can-watch matinee buffet. It took me all of Real Genius to wrap Maus's gifts, and both Compulsion and most of Flight of the Phoenix to wrap for parents, siblings, and cousins.

Flight of the Phoenix. Not a movie I ever intended to bother seeing, as I'm a fan of the thrilling 1965 version, and this 2004 remake didn't appear to have much to offer beyond a spectacular crash sequence at the beginning. But the Tivo had picked it up, and Giovanni Ribisi was an intriguing choice for the Hardy Kruger role, so why not?

I'm tired of remakes of movies that simply don't need to be remade: Psycho, The Bad News Bears, Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, Sabrina. I don't mind remakes that add something or retell the story in a distinctly different light (Dawn of the Dead, Alfie, Planet of the Apes, War of the Worlds) — these sometimes turn out rather well. Occasionally. OK, rarely. I am looking forward to Peter Jackson's King Kong, hoping this incarnation of the great ape will fare better than its 1976 predecessor.

But the new Flight of the Phoenix is weak and flat, almost perplexingly so. It's a faithful remake of a solid film, but the depth has been sucked out of it. It tries to add new drama to the original story (in the way of a woman among the survivors, the menace of armed bandits, and, I shit you not, a dance sequence), but waters down and recycles exactly the same moments from the original for its key dramatic moments — so that for anyone who saw the original, there is no drama left in the film.

I don't know, it seems like all the right elements were in place — characters, actors, story, setting, effects. But the movie never gets up off its ass. It just jumps sequentially from plot point to plot point without any buildup of tension or sense of time passing. The original film depicted a gradual erosion of strength against mounting desperation; by the end the characters were too weak and exhausted to even argue... when they drag the Phoenix to its makeshift runway, all they have left to pull with is raw hope.

Not so in the remake. It's not enough to simply let the hope of survival hinge on whether the reconstructed plane will fly — they have to have a horde of armed bandits on horseback chase it down the runway. (Why the bandits wait for the plane to taxi before deciding to attack is beyond me.) And then, when the plane does lift off, the survivors strapped to its wings cheer and hoot and pump their fists in the air. In the original, they hang on for dear life and pray the damn thing stays in the air.

See? Now I really want to see the original again. I guess remakes are good for that if nothing else. Oh yeah, and everybody's presents are now wrapped. So it's not a total loss.