One second… give me a couple of hours to
watch the original 'RoboCop' and I'll be right back to talk
about this remake. Enjoy the music on the line while you
wait.
Good… that's done. I just wanted to revisit the classic
'Robocop - 1987', The Director's Cut no less, to get a feel
for the new movie, which as it so happened I enjoyed.
Kind of. 'Robocop - 2014' is not a better movie, but the
creators of this new film took one of the more interesting
approaches to the reboot I've seen, to a debatable degree of
success.
Chances are you know 2028 Detroit Detective Alex Murphy (Joel
Kinnaman). Hardcore cop, doesn't play by the
rules? That guy. Murphy and his partner Lewis
(Michael K. Williams) have been relentlessly investigating
ruthless gun runner Anton Vallon (Patrick Garrow) with little
to show for their trouble except empty hands. Mainly due
to the corruption on the Detroit Police Force.
Regardless, Vallon has had enough and Murphy needs to be dealt
with, harshly and swiftly.
Now say hello to OminCorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton)
who has deployed a crapload of his super robots all over the
world to police the unruly peoples, but the Stinking Liberals
in Congress won't allow unmanned, unfeeling robots to police
our own unruly people. Liberals! But what if we
had a man in a robot? A man
with all the reflexes, fire power and near invulnerability of
a machine, but the thought process and decision making of a
human. The Libs couldn't complain about that could
they? All they need is a relatively emotional stable,
dedicated police officer who may recently have gotten messed
up really, really bad.
Luck has shined on OmniCorp as a candidate for this potential
program has recently become available. Alex's lovely
wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) has reluctantly signed the release
form and now brilliant Cyborg physicist Dr. Norton (Gary
Oldman) can get to work on RoboCop, and changing the face of
American Law Enforcement.
As you might imagine, it was tough for Murphy
to start, having a body that consists of a head, some lungs, a
right arm and a bunch of cybernetics, but eventually he comes
around to the inevitability of his new life. Some
tweaking still needs to be done since Murphy, his brain, and
his emotions are not completely vibing with the new system,
but now Detroit has a brand new functional Robotic cop, and he
is so good at his job that it looks like Sellars might be able
to get that pinko anti-robot bill repealed. Unless, you
know, something goes wrong. Like Robocop trying to solve
his own murder or shooting up a lot people dead, even if they
deserve it. Or something like having to put Robocop down
if he threatens the corporate bottom line. We can't have
Robo doing that.
I don't think that there's a lot of people, at least people
who spent considerable time in the 1980's who heard about a
remake to Paul Verhoeven's 'Robocop' and said 'Yay!'
Particularly after hearing that this Robocop would be a
relatively bloodless, profanity free, PG-13 outing. Who
would want to see that? Well, my hats to director
Jose Padilha as he has made a movie which is completely
different from that 1987 classic, updated to reflect the times
that we are living in now, but also retains just enough
fragments of the original, featuring a few subtle nods here
and there, which separates the two films and really makes
comparing them very difficult. Not that this is going to
stop us from doing it.
There are the similarities as we start off with our daily
news, a man in Pat Novak (Samuel L. Jackson) who doesn't
really give us news but, like we are used to today, he more of
is a rightwing whackjob pundit with a TV show. Think
Sean Hannity, Glen Beck and Bill Curtis turned up to a level
of 11. Where the original attacked corporate greed, a
warped media and crime in a very satirical, almost cartoonish
style, including the violence, this movie confronts the same
issues much more seriously. Maybe too seriously?
More effort was put in, this time around, in attempting to
develop the man in the robot suit, and now he has to attempt
to balance a relationship with his family, despite his
issues. Early on, all of this works fine. I liked
that Murphy had a wife he loved and a relationship with his
son, as it did give the character more depth, but there were
sacrifices made to that end. This is a movie really
lacks a central main villain. The character of
Vallon and a couple of dirty cops might've been bad
dudes, but they were almost an afterthought, something that
had to happen in order for Murphy to become Robocop, and then
dealt with accordingly. I imagine the real bad dude was
Michael Keaton's Sellars, but was he really a bad guy?
At the end of the day this cat was just trying to maximize
profit for his company, and he didn't do anything in
particular out of malice, just with an eye on the bottom
line. My point being that while I recognized that
what he was doing was wrong, I didn't feel any real sense that
he was an issue that needed to be handled with extreme
prejudice. Just a couple of years in a federal prison
maybe.
The action sequences were hit and miss, some of them kind of
cool, like Robo's final training sequence against a platoon of
robots, but most of them moved to fast and employed such quick
cut camera techniques that it made it somewhat difficult to
see what was going on.
All that being said, I was entertained by the reboot of
'Robocop'. It can't compare to the original, at least
not favorably, but really… what can? Standing on its
own, despite it's over seriousness and suspect action, it adds
enough new while retaining some of the old… I'll Buy that for
a Dollar… to keep us invested for a couple of hours. A
sequel? Even that didn't work out all that well for the
original, so we can only hope it ends here.
