For a viewer already familiar with the French film The Intouchables, watching its newly released American remake The Upside can often feel like one of those games challenging you to spot the differences between two seemingly identical photos.

The core of an unlikely friendship between a wealthy white man and a black ex-con has been kept intact, and most of the elements changed stop at the superficial. Omar Sy’s Driss purloins a jade egg from his moneyed, quadriplegic employer (and soon-to-be bestie) Philippe, while Kevin Hart’s Del nicks a vintage copy of Huckleberry Finn from Phillip. His passion for the musical stylings of Earth, Wind and Fire has been swapped out for a love of Aretha Franklin. That Philippe fares much better than his Stateside equivalent on his first date with his romantic pen pal counts for something, but the most meaningful alteration has to be the relocation from Paris to New York.

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A giggly, late-night trip to get munchies from Manhattan’s storied Gray’s Papaya hot dog stand constitutes the only dash of specificity in a film that has otherwise been scrubbed of its time and place. Whatever the original may have had to say about socioeconomic disparity in France has been not lost, but actively disposed of in translation by an industry that values the generic as safe. The original was widely criticized in its native France for trafficking in stereotypes, but at least its distance between the banlieue and the tonier streets of Paris was real. The Upside makes a vagary of a vagary, with no sense of what the words “rich” or “poor” mean in the present-day United States.

Hollywood’s ever-mounting need for fresh material has left its own past a graveyard of mangled intellectual property, and so The Upside arrives at the nose end of a spike in American remakes of more highly acclaimed foreign films. But the pattern of imports chosen for the dubious honor of a second life in the American entertainment industry suggests cause for concern in its emphasis on the pliable and familiar. Films once distinguished for their originality are then purchased for their potential sameness.

Audiences taking in Neil Burger’s fantasy of polite racial harmony will be treated to the trailer for Twilight director Catherine Hardwicke’s take on the 2011 Mexican thriller Miss Bala. The true-ish story of Laura Guerrero, a beauty queen forcibly conscripted into collaboration with the La Estrella gang, was notable for its concentrations on fear and helplessness – two uncommon, unpredictable qualities in the protagonist of an action film. In the trailer for the upcoming remake, Gina Rodriguez’s Gloria learns how to handle a rifle, wraps the DEA around her finger as a double agent, and unleashes hell in a few shots that wouldn’t look out of place in one of the many Michael Mann knockoffs cluttering Best Buy discount bins.

Those films cleanly pigeonholed into genre and boasting an easily pitched hook tend to make the trip across the Atlantic. Family comedies seem to fit the bill, even if they’re coming from countries with a nastier sense of humor than would make sense to US audiences. Force Majeure hinges on cowardice, insecurity and male fragility, so who better to make all that palatable for Americans than Will Ferrell, playing opposite Julia-Louis Dreyfus? Perhaps casting Tom Hanks in the lead role of the American version of A Man Called Ove will take the edge off of all the misery and suicide attempts that precede the heartwarming togetherness of its back half. As for Toni Erdmann, slated to be reworked with Kristen Wiig, I pegged it as a more artfully shot, mean-spirited clone of Adam Sandler’s That’s My Boy when I first saw the film at Cannes in 2016.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A still from Thelma. Photograph: film company handout

We’ve been steadily recycling foreign horror for decades, lest we forget the J-horror boom of the early 2000s, in which Hollywood nicked the haunted-house conceit and the gaunt-faced ghost children while ditching the films’ weirder curlicues. To his credit, Nicolas Pesce has made it clear that his re-remake of The Grudge will be its own creature, as if anticipating the phenomenon of international bland-ening discussed here. Only time will tell if the new interpretations of Norway’s Thelma (repressed lesbian impulses lead to violent telekinesis and dead birds) and Austria’s Goodnight Mommy (a pair of twins with Capgras syndrome attempt to kill their bandaged mother, under the impression she is an impostor) preserve the tone and subtext of their originals, in addition to the bones of the premise. Same goes for the thrillers in the vein of The Guilty, a Danish production about a cop on desk duty who solves a crime through the phone, soon to be remounted with Jake Gyllenhaal in the lead.

An order for Americanization is not a death certificate for subtlety or quality, but these productions have intangible qualities – aloofness, a sadistic streak, a greater comfort with unhappy endings – unique to their homelands. Like aliens struggling to breathe in our Earth’s atmosphere, some of these films could not survive in the mainstream movie marketplace without significant revision. When abroad, even if it’s just at the multiplex, we gravitate toward whatever reminds us of home.