The Iliad reimagined as a buddy movie

Reading a bit of The Iliad (Fagles translation, excellent) alongside my reading of David Malouf's "Ransom," and realize that the retelling is almost entirely based on he events of book 24, last book of the Iliad. The first half or so of Ransom touches on the highlights of Achilles' wrath, killing of Hector, abuse of Hector's body. Then we get to the heart of the novel, Malouf's take on Priam's journey into enemy territory to ransom the body of Hector. This material is potentially highly dramatic - could be a great movie, on the model of many Westerns, can just picture the Coen brothers doing it - Priam crossing dangerous ground in a mule cart, the odd encounter with Hermes in human form. Malouf's main interest is the developing relation between Priam, who has led the sheltered and protected life of royalty, and the mule-cart driver, Somax/Ideaus, with his peasant wisdom and working-class fatalism. Well, I could see this as kind of a buddy movie, too. Also has significant echoes of King Lear, the old and powerful man suddenly feeling ineffectual. This second half of the book definitely picks up in narrative interest, but it still feels like a sketch for a novel rather than a fully developed work of fiction - lots of sentence fragments, quick observations, not the great psychological depth and original insights we'd expect from a world-class novelist meditating on one of the classics of literature. Other great writers have taken on similar topics late in their careers: Updike on Hamlet, Coetze on Robinson Crusoe, for example - and usually with limited success: our interest in these works tends to be in what they show about the contemporary writer. Rarely do these retellings of classics match up in any way to the work they're emulating.