Film Review: “RoboCop”

“RoboCop”
is the latest film remake to hit theaters — on a weekend that saw no fewer than
three 80’s movies getting modern adaptations — giving the Paul Verhoeven sci-fi-action classic a shiny new hardware
upgrade. While it is leaps and bounds better than the previous attempt to
duplicate a Verhoeven masterwork (2012’s dreadful
“Total Recall”), this new “RoboCop” lacks much of the
heart and soul that made the original so great. That’s rather ironic for a film
about what differentiates man from machine.

The original “RoboCop,” released in 1987, was a razor-sharp satire of 80’s
excess, corporate greed, and mindless media, all concealed beneath an
ultraviolent, B-movie aesthetic. Brazilian director José Padilha
(“Elite Squad”) had the thankless job of creating a film that lives up to the
original’s legacy, while finding some new insight to the story. No easy task,
and it’s a testament to him, as well as screenwriter Joshua Zetumer, that the film comes as close
as it does to delivering on that promise.

Padilha and Zetumer
tiptoe into the debate over drone warfare, opening the film in Tehran, where
mega-conglomerate OmniCorp is supplying the U.S.
military with robotic soldiers to keep the restless population under control
and give American officers the ability to settle any potential uprisings with the
push of a button. It’s this early section that gives us the film’s most biting
bit of commentary, so it’s a shame when it’s almost immediately abandoned in
favor of the sort of slickly produced, bloodless, CGI violence that’s required
of all modern action films.

OmniCorp desires to bring its robo-product
to America, but it needs a way to sell it to the general public, which remains
leery of a police force made up of weaponized
machines without a conscience. The corporation’s CEO, Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton, seemingly having a ball), enlists the help of robotics scientist Dr. Dennett
Norton (Gary Oldman) in developing a way to put a man
inside the machine and give the public the illusion that there’s something
with a moral compass still in control.

Enter Alex Murphy (Joel
Kinnaman, “The Killing”), a noble Detroit policeman and
family man, who is nearly killed after a car bomb halts his investigation into
a generic bad guy and the corruption within the police force that allows that
bad guy to run free. Near death, Murphy is the perfect test subject for OmniCorp’s program. Norton melds what little is left of the
young cop onto a cyborg body, making Murphy the face of the future of crimefighting and a pawn in OmniCorp’s
ongoing PR campaign.

Zetumer’s script adds an intriguing element to the
story in allowing Norton to give his creation the illusion of free will by
adjusting exactly how much control Murphy is allowed to exert over his
mechanical body — while still giving Murphy the impression that he’s always
running the show. But test runs show that human characteristics like fear and
instinct make their robocop imperfect, and it’s no
surprise when OmniCorp execs find they get better
results from their creation when the “Murphy” setting is turned down to “low.”

Of course, Murphy’s
will proves stronger than expected, and he begins to overwrite his system by
starting to investigate the circumstances that led to his murder.
Unfortunately, that plotline is by far the least interesting part of the film,
and Padilha seems to know it. Still, the variations
in humanity allow Kinnaman to portray a significantly
less stoic RoboCop than Peter Weller in the original
film, which adds audience sympathy to the character’s plight.

The film also wrings
an extra bit of emotion out of an increased focus on Murphy’s wife (played by
Abbie Cornish) and child, who Verhoeven’s film
ignored almost entirely. In general, the performances in the remake are a
marked improvement over the original, which had more than its share of stiff
actors and clunky dialogue. Here, the supporting cast is loaded with ringers.
In addition to Keaton’s scenery chewing and Oldman’s
surprisingly nuanced performance, Jay Baruchel,
Jackie Earle Haley, and Jennifer Ehle all manage to
make great impressions as various OmniCorp lackeys.

Padilha’s action sequences are competent if
unremarkable, save for a nifty gunfight lit only by blasts of machine-gun fire.
The over-reliance on CGI and computer-assisted camera moves make the fights
resemble a video game. The problem is not helped by the fact that we often see
the battles through RoboCop’s computerized POV, which
displays a counter letting him know how many enemies he’s neutralized.

The film does
contain a few clever bits of humor, like one character’s mockery of Murphy
through the use of a rather iconic song, and the presence of Pat Novak (Samuel
L. Jackson, especially Samuel L. Jackson-y), a Bill O’Reilly-esque newscaster who provides commentary throughout the
film. But these moments are few and far between, and the overall tone is more
dour and serious-minded than a film about a robot super cop has any reason to
be. The missing sense of fun damages the film the most, and that’s a shame: a
version combining the improved performances of this film with the dark, topical
satire of the original might have been something special.

This article appears in Feb 12-18, 2014.