Remake a "RoboCop"-Out

After 2012’s lackluster “Total Recall” reboot, the notion of yet another remake of a Paul Verhoeven movie may elicit more groaning than excitement from many moviegoers. But passing judgment on a movie too quickly can lead someone to miss out on things that are worth seeing. For instance, you’d have been forgiven for thinking at first that the original “RoboCop,” a movie about a cybernetic lawman patrolling the mean streets of Detroit, seemed silly. But by passing over the film, you’d miss an exciting and relatively self-aware meditation on the military-industrial complex and the price society pays for coming down hard on crime. By the same token, action movie fans may want to give this new “RoboCop” a chance. While it has some weaknesses in plotting and pacing, José Padilha’s “RoboCop” remake is a decent action flick that makes a respectable effort to take the RoboCop concept in new directions.

The overall premise of the new “Robocop” will be fairly familiar to those who remember the originals. Police detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is critically injured by a car bomb while attempting to investigate corruption in his department. In Murphy’s personal tragedy, Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), CEO of the multinational arms manufacturer OmniCorp, sees a PR opportunity, so he convinces Murphy’s wife (Abbie Cornish) to allow OmniCorp to restore the wounded officer to health with experimental prosthetics. Since it may be her husband’s only chance to walk again, she agrees, and a team of OmniCorp researchers place the few functioning parts of the detective into a powerful, robotic body. Thus, RoboCop is born and takes to the streets of Detroit to mete out justice, eventually confronting the criminals who made the attempt on his life.

RoboCop is generally a good-looking movie. The years since the release of the 1987 original have seen great advancements in special effects, and it shows from the opening scene featuring new and improved CGI versions of Omnicorp’s colossal Enforcement Droids. In addition, the audience is treated to some stylish action by cinematographer Lula Carvalho. In one memorable combat sequence, RoboCop takes on a gang of heavily armed thugs in a dark warehouse with few sources of light apart from muzzle flashes and the ominous red glow of his visor. Unfortunately, the action feels unevenly spaced throughout the film; the first half of the movie could have used a bit more excitement, while the second half felt a bit too cluttered with it to be fully coherent at all times.

Acting isn’t necessarily the centerpiece of an action-oriented movie like this one, but several performances in the film deserve praise. Kinnaman as Alex Murphy remains largely stoic throughout the film but may pull a few heartstrings in the scene in which he first sees his new body. Samuel L. Jackson makes a humorous performance as Pat Novak, a pastiche of right-wing TV commentators and a fervent supporter of Omnicorp’s business practices on the airwaves. The only lead actor who disappoints is Michael Keaton, whose portrayal of Sellars is fairly unremarkable and largely overshadowed by other actors throughout the movie.

To its credit, the new “RoboCop” avoids simply retreading the arc of its predecessor’s plot by exploring characters and themes that the original did not. For instance, this film fleshes out Murphy’s relationship with his family and explores how the protagonist’s wife and son might cope with having the beloved father of their family return to them a changed man. It also does a good job at making the stakes of the issues at hand feel grander in scope by framing Omnicorp’s RoboCop initiative as a pilot program for a potential nationally distributed line of law enforcement robots.

However, comparing this “RoboCop” to the 1987 version also accentuates a few weaknesses of the new film’s narrative. While the original movie excelled at constructing a bleak version of Detroit so violent and lawless as to be almost inhospitable to life, the Detroit of this “RoboCop” film doesn’t seem more exceptionally dangerous than any contemporary metropolis. This makes OmniCorp and its supporters seem less like they’re operating in a morally gray area by offering an extreme solution to city’s problems and more like plain old villains capitalizing on Detroit’s unfounded fears, effectively washing away some of the ethical ambiguity that made the first film thought-provoking.  The plot of the new movie has a few shortcomings compared to that of its originator as well. The original film featured a much more memorable collection of villains, and some people may consider the ending to the new film to be somewhat of a RoboCop-out compared to that of the original.

“RoboCop” isn’t an outstanding picture, but it does successfully distinguish itself from its ancestors and deliver some good laughs and solid action. With the addition of this new film, the RoboCop franchise has come to resemble its own premise: brought back from the dead and outfitted with some of the most impressive bells and whistles modern technology can afford, it still struggles to reclaim the heart of its previous life.

—Staff writer C.E. Chiemeka Ezie can be reached at claude-michael.ezie@thecrimson.com.