RoboCop (2014)

Even in the best of circumstances, a PG-13 remake of Paul Verhoeven’s sci-fi classic RoboCop is, to put it lightly, a horrible idea. All things considered, the circumstances surrounding José Padilha’s new take on the character aren’t all that bad. This is a film with a fantastic supporting cast that includes Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, Samuel L. Jackson and more, and it has a script from Joshua Zetumer that actually attempts to tackle interesting ideas about living in the drone age. At the very least, this new film makes a fine argument for RoboCop’s relevance in the 21st century, but Zetumer and Padilha are ultimately trapped by the expectations of making a mainstream action film. It’s not a bad mainstream action film by any means, but it’s hard to look past the unrealized potential.

As with the original, Padilha’s RoboCop tells the story of Detroit police officer Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), who is critically wounded after an attempt on his life. Meanwhile, the massive company OmniCorp has been looking for a way to convince Americans that robotic police officers are the way of the future. In Murphy, they see a real marketing opportunity, and thus they turn him into the man/machine hybrid they call RoboCop. OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Keaton) puts Dr. Gary Norton (a terrific Oldman) in charge of the project, and their job is to turn Murphy into a symbol of justice all of the United States can get behind.

None of this goes smoothly, of course, as OmniCorp must get past initial protests from Murphy, as well as the pesky issue of his humanity. There are interesting moments throughout the film where the suit is treated as a sort of prison, but like so many of the ideas here it eventually turns into a half-thought. Most of those half-thoughts are interesting as far as they go, but as was the case with so many big-budget action films before, RoboCop devotes almost all of its third act to the standard chase scenes and shootouts. Long before the end I had accepted that this film would choose to go the standard action film route, but at least it was doing it in rather intelligent fashion. Once Murphy started flying through windows and taking out drones in a hail of gunfire, even that was gone. I realize there are certain expectations when making a movie like this, but the way Padilha’s RoboCop chooses to end is a real dud.

Even so, it’s clear everyone involved wanted to make something other than the traditional slick remake. None of the performers are phoning it in, and the scenes in which the OmniCorp executives sit around and plan their next move are often the most fascinating in the movie. It’s a shame that the film eventually must get down to the business of RoboCop taking out the bad guys, and those scenes could never leave the impact that Verhoeven’s film did. This is a project that was destined to lose right from the start, and it would have taken a miracle to really live up to the RoboCop name. It mostly succeeds in being a diverting sci-fi film, but it’s not nearly good enough to make audiences forget about a certain 1987 film they could be watching instead.

Grade: B-