RoboCop
Everything 80’s is new again? Shouldn’t I be exempt from
seeing the remakes if I already lived through the horror the first
time? I demand to invoke that clause if they remake Weekend at
Bernie’s.
Set in 2028, Joel Kinnaman stars as Alex Murphy – a good cop
surrounded by corruption and crime in a Detroit that is lawless and
dangerous (also known as Detroit being Detroit). He thinks some of his
fellow cops are working with the local crime lord, and, as he and his
partner get closer to the truth, Alex is targeted for murder.
He barely survives the attempt on his life, but OmniCorp thinks they
can rebuild him. The big multinational conglomerate’s charismatic
leader, Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), believes Alex could be the
one who can help him sell a new crime fighting tool to cities across
America. The company’s Dr. Dennet Norton (Gary Oldman) combines
Alex’s computer-enhanced brain with a robotic body to make him an
almost invincible weapon of mass destruction, but still capable of
relying on common sense and human compassion to police the right way.
However, Alex’s memories about his former life start to return,
and he wants to get even with those who tried to kill him as he is less
and less capable of being human.
Can Dr. Norton come up with a way to control Alex?
Should he?
What kind of damage will this RoboCop do?
RoboCop is a movie with a whole lotta nothing
going on interrupted by the more than occasional explosion.
Writers Joshua Zetumer has 4 different plots going on here, but none of
them seem to tie in together at all. Scenes with Alex and his family
are supposed to humanize the character and make us like him because he
has a wife and a kid, but those are the moments where you confidently
can go to the bathroom without missing much because Zetumer is just
paying lip service to the whole idea of the dedicated family man and
loving father and husband.
Oldman is acting the pants off of everyone else and tries to make Dr.
Norton’s inner struggle the most passable story in RoboCop
as he shows us the Doc grappling with the desire to see his project
succeed versus his moral conscience trying to figure out whether or not
he should be building Frankenstein’s Monster, but it’s not
at the center of RoboCop, so it can’t pull you in on its
own. It’s a nice side dish in a messed up meal.
And, we have some sort of political battle going on between Sellars and
a U.S. Senator opposing his company, but the only fun and/or
interesting part of that story is watching Samuel L. Jackson camping it
up as a parody of a Bill O’Reilly-type TV talk show host.
Then, let’s not forget all about those corrupt cops!
Sadly, each one of these stories just gets placed into the rotation by
director Jose Padilha as each scene runs out of steam.
The special effects are pretty good, and you do get to see some stuff
go boom (except for an extended sequence in the dark that probably
looked awesome on the storyboard, but not in the execution), but RoboCop
is a bland, pointless movie.
RoboCop is rated PG-13 for intense sequences of
action including frenetic gun violence throughout, brief strong
language, sensuality and some drug material.
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