RoboCop

The RoboCop remake is a total assembly line movie.  Sure, it's been made with a certain degree of skill, but it's also been completely sanitized to the point that we watch the movie with total indifference.  It's not boring, but there's never anything that really grabs out attention either.  The graphic violence and gleeful satire of the 1987 original have been completely removed, so that the film can give us a quieter, more character-driven story.  That's all well and good, but the movie overlooks one crucial detail - In order to have a character-driven story, you need interesting characters to drive it.

It's clear what director Jose Padilha and first time screenwriter Joshua Zetumer are trying to do to set their film apart from Paul Verhoeven's Sci-Fi cult classic.  Rather than make a bloody and violent satire on action movies in general, they want their RoboCop movie to be more human.  This film puts a much larger emphasis on Alex Murphy (played here by Joel Kinnaman), the man inside the machine.  It wants to be about how he is slowly dehumanized during the process of him being converted into a mechanical body, and how it effects both him and his family, which consists of a fretful wife and a sad-eyed son.  It also wants to explore some of the ethical questions and issues about the how process of putting a man's soul inside a machine, and question who is in control underneath all that hardware - Murphy or the computer?  Can a man truly be controlled?  These are the serious questions that the scientist responsible for the project (Gary Oldman) finds himself confronted with as RoboCop is unleashed upon the streets of Detroit.

I could get behind this approach if the screenplay was actually willing to ask them, instead of kind of tiptoeing up to the issue, then quickly backing away.  And as I mentioned, the characters simply aren't interesting enough to drive such thoughtful material.  Even before he becomes a mechanical one-man weapon against crime, Alex Murphy never strikes us as a unique or interesting individual.  He loves his wife and kid, and he's obsessed with catching a criminal by the name of Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow).  That's about all we get to learn about him before a car bomb goes off, severely damaging most of his body, and making him a prime candidate to have what remains of him placed in a robotic exoskeleton.  Once he's inside that suit, it becomes an internal struggle as Murphy tries to hold onto what little humanity he has left.  But the thing is, the robot side and the human side never seem all that different.  Unlike the layered performance Peter Weller gave in the original, Kinnaman seems cold in his emotions, even before he is being controlled by a mega corporation as a publicity device.

The RoboCop project is spearheaded by a billionaire robotics genius named Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton).  He wants his robots to protect the streets of the city, but Congress and the American people are questionable about having robots keeping the peace.  He soon comes to the conclusion that a man mixed with a machine might calm some of those fears, and begins looking for cops who have been wounded and handicapped during service.  When he comes across Murphy, he knows he's found his man.  What follows is a very long and drawn out sequence that takes up a good chunk of the film, where Alex must learn to use his new robotic body.  He is trained in using his new hardware, as well as weaponry.  By the time RoboCop is finally ready to be revealed to the public, hit the streets, and start fighting crime, the movie is almost halfway over.  Those who walk into this film expecting a thrill ride will be disappointed.  There's very little action on display here, and what action there is usually is filmed in the dreaded "shaky cam" style.

Again, I could easily live with this if the characters were interesting enough to carry a movie,.  None of them are.  Much is made in this film of Murphy's wife (Abbie Cornish) trying to reach her husband as he is slowly consumed by the computerized brain controlling him.  Her struggle to keep her husband's humanity in check should be a noble one, but the movie doesn't even treat her as a character.  She's instead used as a plot device, and the movie never goes deeper into her relationship with her husband than just the very shallow surface.  Same goes for their young son, who seems bothered by what his father has become.  Again, this could have been a compelling little subplot, but the movie completely ignores it, and pushes it to the side.  This is ultimately what makes RoboCop a frustrating experience.  You can see that it wants to explore these characters, but it never gives itself the luxury to do so.  It's like the movie is constantly selling itself short.

I also think it was a mistake to drop RoboCop's partner from the original film.  While he does still have a partner (played by Michael K. Williams), he doesn't really get to play any part in the story.  He kind of comes and goes from the film at will, and never even gets to work alongside RoboCop, which makes the character all the more pointless.  There's just a lot of wasted potential up on the screen.  You can see promise everywhere you look, but the movie either ignores the opportunity, or it doesn't build like it should.  The movie is frequently interrupted by a TV show called The Novak Element, where a Bill O'Reilly wannabe played by Samuel L. Jackson rants and raves about the need for robots in America.  Jackson is lively in the role, but the satire is limp, since it exists in a universe outside of the actual movie.  The original film featured a lot of funny made up TV clips, which I think this film is trying to mimic here, but it doesn't work that well.  I also enjoyed the film's opening sequence, which shows massive robots keeping peace in Iran, but again, it is merely a set piece, and never really connects with the total film.

I am not of the mind that the original RoboCop movie is sacred and untouchable.  I think a remake could very well have worked if handled the right way, but this movie takes too many wrong turns.  It is a noble effort, and at the very least, it's not as terrible as many fans feared it would be.  It never offends the memory of the original, while at the same time not doing enough to live up to it.

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