The Magnificent Seven, Edge of Tomorrow, and Monkey Magic were all fine, just off the top of my head.
Sure a lot of adaptations are handled badly - but one can easily find well done adaptations as well.
"the west can't adapt the East" is just racism.
The Departed, in my own opinion, is an excellent adaptation of
Infernal Affairs, one that it wouldn't surprise me that some audiences might rate as outright better. I don't feel that way, personally, but between Scorsese's sheer reputation, the ensemble cast (and Anglophone audiences tendency to avoid films with subtitles), it's easy to picture. But
The Departed is an adaptation/retelling/whatever so far removed that it's linked almost exclusively by a unique high concept--"Police infiltrate the mob, while the mob infiltrates the police," and is set in a completely different culture that even embraces a
unique historical device (the fall of a particular historical gang in Boston). Whatever the case, it works very well, and was a critical
and commercial success and widely lauded.
You can't say the same thing about
Edge of Tomorow (
Live. Die. Repeat.) in terms of reception, but the technique involved has some similarity: a completely different cast and setting connected only by a very unique, very distinctive concept from the manga that inspired it--"A (male) soldier is killed fighting an alien invasion, and is sent back in time. He finds that each time he dies, he's sent back in time, and tries to use this ability to help a much
better (female) soldier, who is a decorated war hero, who will help him not die in turn." It really doesn't try to hide its enormous other differences otherwise (much later in the manga, after the film was announced, the war hero Rita even lampshades how a fictional western adaptation of her career turned her into your typical American-style comic book bombshell).
I'm using these two examples for a reason. They came out in a somewhat comparable timeframe as Dreamwork's
Ghost in the Shell (also a major blockbuster film), which went beyond copying a concept (in the case of
Ghost in the Shell, presumably it'd be..."In a post post-cyberpunk, a hypercompetent police commander leads her special forces unit into a state conspiracy while dealing with existential dread" or something), and slavishly sought to imitate the original (and more specifically, the incarnation of the original that it's American audience was most immediately familiar with--the Oshii film from 1995, which while successful is
not as culturally dominant as the manga that inspired it or the TV series that followed it in Japan and many other countries), to the point of
very deliberately reproducing scenes shot-for-shot from said film, which appeared in no other adaptation. Those details aside, whether or not you liked the film (I thought it was
not good), it was a major commercial flop
and critically panned (it can't even boast
Edge of Tomorrow's surprisingly high critical response). Netflix's
Cowboy Bebop has more than its share of similarities: it slavishly reproduced distinct visual flares, it invited in original talent to advise (like Yoko Kanno), and while it did make its own necessary adjustments (as did Dreamworks), it was pretty clearly in awe of its inspiration, and it was a very deliberate (and seemingly sensible) project acknowledging that. And then it flopped.
I know this is a pretty wide example, and there's a limit to what we can take away from it beyond "Good films tend to have good filmmakers, shocking, yes." So far, a slavish obedience to the aesthetic style of the producers (or at least, what the showrunners consider the aesthetic style of a studio in a completely different country, twenty or more years ago) hasn't worked out very well.
Death Note looks
pretty darn close to the television series consider they're both set in 21st century cityscapes, and as much as I adore William Dafoe, that's not a good film. In
Cowboy Bebop, the production team hired by Netflix.....looked at a Sunrise 1990's one-off original television series (one of literally dozens they did) that ran in 1998, did respectably okay enough to get a theatrical film announced by Sunrise in 1999, which was in theaters in 2001, and then
after that....came to the United States and Latin America and hit gold). It seems understandable that, twenty years later, the studio hired by Netflix would have to look at that particular (and later) life of Sunrise's TV series, determine what American audiences loved to their best of their ability, and turned that into a series. That
really seems to be what Dreamworks did with
Ghost in the Shell (and as poorly as that was received in the US, and utterly failed as it was overseas, there are people who genuinely like film).
A western studio can do an adaptation. But honestly, going by the last few years of examples (the Wachowski's
Speed Racer seems to have a faithful cult following...but it really seems like a drug-fueled psychedelic fever dream that's hard to compare to anything, much less the 1960's
Mach Gogo TV series), you're going to have to put in the work, to the point where you may be asking yourself, "Can I even call this an adaptation at all? I don't think the fans will, whether or not like they like it."
