Let me start out by saying that I love Robocop, and I have since I was a kid. The original came out when I was 6 and I nearly convinced my mom to take me to see it in the theater (after all, how terrible could a movie with a goofy name like “Robocop” be, even though it was rated “R”). The following year the animated series premiered. I watched every episode faithfully and collected the toys (except for ED-260, which we could never seem to find). I sat through two sequels of declining quality, a television show produced for a budget what seemed like $5 an episode, and a miniseries made for pocket change. I’ve read the comics from Marvel to Dark Horse, to Dynamite to Boom.
I know Robocop, and I love Robocop.
That said, the new Robocop isn’t
Robocop. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not “not Robocop” because the design changed,
or because it’s not Peter Weller. It’s not “not Robocop” because Lewis is a
man, or because Media Break has been replaced with the Novak Element. It’s not
even “not Robocop” because he’s fast and rides a motor cycle. It’s not Robocop
because, quite frankly, the movie lacks almost every element that made the
original film so good (and was reflected in ever decreasing ways in its sequels
and spin-offs.)
The new Robocop starts promisingly
enough with Samuel L. Jackson as Pat Novak giving a Rush Limbaugh/Glenn Beck
inspired rant about “robophobia” in America. He talks about legislation which
outlaws drones and military/police robots on American soil. To highlight the
success of these drones, he shows a live feed with one of his reporters from
Tehran where ED-209’s (which look fantastic) and human-like drones are doing a
random security sweep. Knowing the Robocop franchise, I suspected where this
scene was going. I had a strong suspicion that one of the droids would mistake
the reporter’s microphone or camera for a weapon and they’d be gunned down on
television. The new film is PG-13, so it wouldn’t be ultra graphic, but would
still make a point. It would perfectly illustrate problems with letting
machines loose with weapons, machines that could not make judgment calls and
instead were subject to program glitches that could prove fatal. Instead, we
just get a rather unexciting confrontation between suicide bombers and the
robots which leads to a boy being gunned down for brandishing a knife at one of
the ED-209’s.
So, instead of something that may
be a bit surprising while highlighting a legitimate problem, we get a pretty by
the numbers “oh no, the robot killed a kid, how could he” scene. Except, that a
real soldier would likely have shot the boy too, since he had a weapon and
intended to attack, so how is this really an issue of a robot being bad because
it can’t feel? The movie hammers on the issue robots not feeling, telling us
that it’s a terrible thing and that Robocop is different, but at the same time
it offers no good reason for its argument and doesn’t make us care enough to
side with its premise. This is really a critical problem with the film, and it
keeps popping up. When Murphy feels, and discovers his humanity, he’s an equally
effective Robocop as to when he’s adjusted not to be emotional. There’s no
critical moment where we see Robocop’s emotions doing something that saves the
day in a way an emotionless Robocop, like the one in the original, wouldn’t. The
film spends so much time and energy on this single argument, but fails to support
it, leaving the audience without a reason to champion its central figure, which
is built as an example of why the human factor is necessary. The absence of
this strong central argument leaves the entire movie feeling like the
emotionless robots it wants us to believe are so terrible.
You don’t cheer, you don’t cry and
you only laugh a handful of times.
The movie introduces Alex Murphy
and portrays him as someone who doesn’t necessarily play by the rules, but who
has good intentions and does what he feels is right. He’s the stereotypical action
movie cop. He sees corruption in his department (strangely, instead of the
original series police division with multiple departments, [Metro South, Metro
West], Detroit in the new film only seems to have one police department) and so
he goes off book to try and get the bad guy, resulting in his partner being
shot. There’s no real purpose behind this turn of events, it doesn’t make us
like Murphy more and it certainly doesn’t establish any real connection with
Lewis, who is strangely and unnecessarily a man in this version (because women
in this version are reduced to wives, yes-men and assistants who exert no real
will or strength on their own). As such, when the city’s crime boss, renamed
Antoine Vallon, puts a bomb on Murphy’s car, he hasn’t done anything that’s
made us really give a damn about him, and so his “death” (no he doesn’t ever
really die) is so swift and telegraphed, that we don’t end up feeling any pity,
shock or sorrow for him. It doesn’t feel like our hero has died (cause he hasn’t,
he’ll just be paralyzed and blind in one eye), it feels more like obligatory
set up.
This problem is compounded in that
that the writers of the film seemed to realize that they underdeveloped Murphy,
and attempt to compensate after they “revive” him as Robocop, by spending a
great deal of time establishing him as a “sad hero”. We see him confused, and
running away from Omnicorp, we see him taken apart in front of a mirror to see
how little of him there is left (which is visually fantastic by the way, and
stands out as one of the best moments in the film), and we see him crying
during a video chat with his wife. (Quick note to screen writers, showing
someone being sad doesn’t make us feel sad for them.)
All of this basically means nothing,
though, because Omnicorp has him quickly rewired so that, by the time he’s on
the streets, there’s not much of Murphy left emotionally, and so he has to go
one the Robocop voyage of self discovery. This could be a great thing, since
the self discovery process is what made the original so compelling, if it hadn’t
been reduced into a 15 minute period with no suspense to it what so ever.
Murphy is confronted by his wife, who says his son is upset. He pulls up CCTV
footage of his son and sees he’s upset, so he investigates his own murder. Then
he solves it in five minutes, shoots up the bad guys and finds iron clad proof
of the corrupt cops in his department.
This was the point where I thought
to myself “Man, that movie flew by, but it has a really anticlimactic ending”. Then I looked at my watch, and realized we
still had a half hour left in the movie.
This brings to light another
critical problem of the film. There really isn’t a plot that develops and
complicates and resolves. Instead the movie goes in bizarre phases that it believes
are linked through Murphys growth, but Murphy isn’t developed enough to grow,
and the movie intentionally sets back that grown in act 2. So what we get it a
series of seemingly episodic pieces that culminate in a third act which feels
tacked on for the sake of mirroring the original films revelation that OCP were
the bad guys. The problem is that while the original added elements to show how
terrible OCP was, the new film makes Omnicorp seem innocuous until they take a
non-sensical dive off the deep end and become flimsy villains for the third
act.
So where does our build up come
from? Murphys character growth is reversed in act 2, so his progression isn’t
out through line. Murphy’s revenge, and the story of police corruption and
Antoine Vallon, go unmentioned for 90% of the film, so that’s not our through
line. Murphys wife and son are pretty minor characters (though more substantial
than in the originals) so it’s not their reconnection with Murphy that pulls us
through. Omnicorp is toothless and mostly window dressing until act 3, so it’s
not their descent into villaindom. So, what is it?
The answer is that there really isn’t
one. The movie has no strong driving force pulling us along for its two hour
run time. It’s just a series of loosely related events that don’t produce a
strong climax or fulfilling resolution. It’s a set of action pieces, that aren’t
exciting, linked by scenes representing emotion that don’t inspire emotion. It’s
actors going through the motions for most of the film with the occasional
shining moment that makes it all the more frustrating by illuminating what
might have been if they’d had a better script and director. It is a generic
action film that hoped to gain a few more ticket sales by slapping a familiar
name on it.
The original Robocop was not only a
great action film, it had an emotional core that created a great throughline.
Robocop’s emotional journey to find his humanity gave the film a dramatic
weight that the new film sorely lacks. Moreover, the original film had a very
sharp sense of humor peppered throughout that never felt forced or out of
place. It offered satire and black humor that never allowed the film to become
too dark or too serious. It had a levity to it that said, “yes our movie is
about a robot cop who can’t move very fast and therefore would make a terrible
cop in real life, but we’re in on the joke”, without playing the story as a
joke. It offers just enough of everything that nothing feels out of place or
forced.
The new film lacks that mixture. It
has its moments of satire, mainly foisted onto Samuel L Jackson and Jay
Baruchel (whose marketing executive could easily be inserted into the original
without making the film miss a beat), but their moments are much more on the
nose and obvious than in the original. It has its “emotional journey” but it’s
unfocused and poorly structured. It has its action, but it feels cookie cutter.
On the whole the film feels like an amateur chef was given a prize winning
recipe, but because of his lack of skill only managed to make something that
sort of looked and tasted like it was supposed to. Eating it certainly won’t
make you sick, but it’s not a meal you’ll remember or come back to.
Let me reiterate this – the Robocop
remake is not horrible. It’s just mediocre. It lacks the intelligence and bite
of the original, and even falls short of the ideas that Robocop 2 throws around
(albeit largely unsuccessfully). It also fails to be abjectly terrible like
Robocop 3. This is a movie by committee which
is a living representation of everything the movie seems to criticize. Perhaps
that’s the greatest thing about the film, it is an unintentional commentary on
itself. A soulless product made not by the passion and creativity of a precious
few, but by men in suits who make a product for profit. It is a product of a
group think that believes it knows what the public wants better than the public
does (illustrated in a scene where Baruchel shows Michael Keaton a rendering of
the original Robocop and tells Keaton that the design is testing through the
roof, to which Keaton responds “the public doesn’t know what it wants until you
give it to them”), and gives them something that lacks everything that the
public ACTUALLY wants. It’s disposable merchandise created to be consumed and
immediately forgotten.
It’s a film that will be almost
entirely forgotten in a years time. It doesn’t and won’t muddy the memory of
the original, because you’ll forget it exists. It’s not offensive, it’s just
empty.
It’s not terrible. It’s just
horribly mediocre, and almost certainly not your $14 bucks.
