Normally if you told me that Hollywood was throwing its full financial support behind a movie called RoboCop that was about a grizzled Detroit police officer named Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) who gets his body blown up and has his surviving parts salvaged so that they can be fused with machinery—turning him into a robot cop—I would be over the moon. But seeing as there was already a movie called RoboCop about that exact thing when I was a kid, and I not only watched the movie, I also watched the animated series, ate lunch out of the lunchbox, and bought the action figures, this new RoboCop arrives carrying some pretty hefty baggage.
That’s really not the way it should be though. Remake or not, we should approach every movie with an open mind, ready to judge it completely on its own merits. We shouldn’t at all compare the different ways in which the Murphy character gets his body destroyed so that he can become RoboCop in each movie, which is a ridiculously awesome bloodbath in Paul Verhoeven’s original film and is a toothless homogenized nothing in this José Padilha-directed remake. Then again, it’s hard to treat these remakes fairly when this one has a line that references the infamous, “I’ll buy that for a dollar,” line from the original. Why do these things always feel the need to include cloying bits of fan service that just take you out of the movie and remind you that you’re watching something that comes pre-loaded with expectations?
The happy news here is that not every bit of this new RoboCop is as disappointing as the scene where Murphy loses the use of his body. The opening of the film is actually pretty hardcore for a PG-13 picture. It involves a squad of suicide bombers in Tehran attacking a patrol of Omnicorp robot drones so that their deaths can be broadcast on an international news channel. You see, a big focus of this new RoboCop is the struggle our society is currently having with the morality of our war machine becoming increasingly more automated. It asks the logical question of how people are going to react once the government wants to start using the drones it’s hunting terrorists with overseas to monitor citizens here, and what the plusses and minuses of that reality would be. The best science fiction not only gives us a possible vision of the future, but also comments on the world we’re living in today, so this movie has that going for it at least.
There’s also a real Frankenstein’s monster aspect to Murphy’s transformation into the robotic cop. The scene where he first wakes up from his near-death experience to find himself inside of a robotic body is claustrophobic and traumatizing. It makes you understand just how much work one would have to do to get used to the reality of being an unstoppable metal fighting machine, even though the idea sounds awesome on paper. That’s not really the most horrific moment in the movie though. The true horror comes when the robotic body is taken away, and we and Murphy both first understand just how little of his organics truly remain under all of the machinery. The scene is like something out of a David Cronenberg movie, and it definitely pushes the limits of what should be allowed in a PG-13 movie. While a bit more ultra-violence would have been appreciated in a story that has such an exploitation-heavy premise, Padilha is at least able to prove that a RoboCop movie doesn’t necessarily need an R-rating to be good.
Though it layered thematics into its story well and included an appropriate amount of body horror, that’s not to say that this new RoboCop is a complete success though. Its script actually proves to be pretty bad pretty often, and it’s likely to leave you shaking your head in frustration more often than not. What’s that mean? It means that there are a number of places where logic or realistic human behavior get thrown out the window so that the plot can get where it needs to go. And it means that personalities and motivations that are established for characters early on eventually get forgotten so that they can be fit into more rigid good guy/bad guy boxes once all of the big showy action sequences start breaking loose. For a movie that gets so high-minded with all of its super-timely drone commentary, it sure is clumsy when it’s trying to tell a story about people, and it sure does slip into a tone of dumb action exploitation more often than you would think. Probably a more concrete decision should have been made as to whether this was going to just be a popcorn flick or if it was going to aspire to be something deeper, because the two competing tones end up subverting one another.
Despite the fact that his script probably needed another rewrite, one thing that you can’t fault Padilha for is the cast he put together. Kinnaman has a lot to do when you consider he’s got to play a pretty ordinary father and cop, a guy who wakes up to find out he’s become a monster, a brain-wiped automaton who’s become more computer than human, and finally a schizophrenic version of his character who’s trying to incorporate all of his previous incarnations, and he manages to be believable the whole way through. One of the main differences between this RoboCop and the original is its focus on how the Murphy character’s brain functions evolve, and it wound up being one of the best parts of the movie, largely thanks to Kinnaman being able to pull it all off with his performance.
In addition to him in the lead role, you’ve also got Michael Keaton being cheeky as the head of the robot cop making, drone pushing Omnicorp, who’s always willing to talk himself into any kind of moral compromise, so long as it’s for the good of his company’s bottom line. Gary Oldman does understated but strong work as the scientist in charge of creating the new half-man, half-machine law enforcement official. He’s probably the character who struggles the most with the implications of everything they’re doing, and you can’t find many performers better suited to a job like that than Oldman. Samuel L. Jackson and Jay Baruchel effectively add comic relief to the film as a conservative-slanted news pundit and a douchey marketing expert. Perhaps the performer who steals the whole movie though is Jackie Earle Haley, who plays a cocky soldier who seems to like machines more than he likes people, and who you can’t wait to see get taken out from the first second he struts onto the screen.
You can criticize RoboCop for sabotaging its satire with too much brainless action. You can criticize it for ruining the spectacle of its shootouts by too often diving back into matters of modern politics. You can probably even criticize it for the things that it didn’t do as well as the ’87 original. Those complaints don’t change the fact that it’s still a not un-fun movie about a cop who gets turned into a robot and then blows away a bunch of bad guys though. You’d have to be pretty cynical to do too much complaining about something like that. Will I be looking forward for another go-around with RoboCop 2? No. But I’ll probably watch this one again some lazy afternoon in the distant future, and I’ll probably get the same smile on my face when RoboCop ramps his motorcycle into an ED-209 like a battering ram and then goes to work blasting through it with his machine gun. That’s exactly the sort of thing movies were invented for in the first place.
