ROBOCOP REMAKE REBOOT REVISION

year: 2014 rating: **

In 2028 Detroit, crime is rampant. Although, with the exception of one cliché shootout, we never really see how bad things have become – to where robots would even be considered in the first place...

Starting with a failed experimentation overseas, Michael Keaton’s subliminally sinister Raymond Sellars, head of “OmniCorp,” decides what reluctant America needs is a sympathetic machine over a cold, heartless robot. Meanwhile, our human hero and future steely crime fighter Alex Murphy, played by an intensely serious Joel Kinnaman, is on the beat.

Soon enough his partner gets shot, and Alex is blown up from a car bomb, planted by the gang we hardly got to know and/or hate: an event occurring much quicker than the violently torturous death sequence from Paul Verhoeven's 1987 original starring Peter Weller… But there’s plenty of gore to come, in another form entirely.

“I don’t want to see myself like this again… ever,” a now robotic Alex Fisher tells his own personal Dr. Frankenstein, actually Dr. Norton who, played by Gary Oldman, fully exposes the limbless, brain-wired creation sans amour. And while given loads of specific information about how the man-machine works, what’s really important is that RoboCop fights crime. But when the urban action scenes finally happen they’re rushed and lackluster: leading to Murphy’s personal vendetta to take down the gang who took him out.

What should have been the main story is peripheral to the corporate chief in desperation mode, bolstered by Samuel Jackson’s over-the-top propaganda newscaster… Through all the exposition, and with an exception of a dull love story sidetrack, Robo gets lost in the shuffle.   

This new fangled COP is like reading a hundred pages of instructions for a quick ten-minute ride. With so much pontificating compassion for the man inside the metal, it doesn’t seem like the filmmakers grasped or, more importantly, enjoyed the concept of a human-robot vigorously fighting crime: And if they don’t like it, why should the audience?