Review: ‘RoboCop’ (2014)

Well it wasn’t the complete piece of shit that I was actually expecting, but that does not mean that this new “RoboCop” movie is actually good. Just because a movie brings up some ideas doesn’t mean it is actually smart or even tried to do anything, especially if nothing is actually said by the movie. Anyone can stand on a street corner and yell about how “drone warfare is bad!” But that doesn’t mean people would want to stand around and listen to this person yelling for two hours. We get it. Drones can be bad. So what?

Taking the movie as its own thing, ignoring the fact that it is a remake of a beloved classic, “RoboCop” at least has a couple things going for. Set about 15 or so years in the future, the movie starts with some television pundit blowhard named Novak (Samuel L. Jackson) just going on and on and on about the use of drones and droids in other countries for reasons of forced pacification, and bemoaning how Americans are against the use of drones here in America*. And here during the beginning segment of the movie, we get some decent ideas about drone warfare and modern American imperialism, and an interesting and daring sequence in which these drones (including ED-209s) get attacked by suicide bombers, determined to make this attack unfold on a live television, and we even get to see a young kid, inspired by his suicide bombing father, pick up a weapon and go at the drones himself (which was pretty stupid on the kids part). So the movie starts with a literal bang and actually for a second seems like it might go to some interesting places.

Unfortunately that is the end of what is actually interesting in this movie for the most part.

We are introduced to Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), he gets on the wrong side of some random criminal named Antoine Vallon, and he gets is ass carbombed (as seen in the trailers and commercials). His wife Clara (Abbie Cornish, always welcome in any movie in my book [book yet to be actually written]) gets the hard sell to sign over Alex Murphy’s medical care to OmniCorp, as the head of OmniCorp Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) wants his super smart doctor scientist fella (Gary Oldman) to help him “put a man inside a machine” so he can sell the American people on robo-law enforcement. Alex Murphy then wakes up from his accident several months later in this new RoboCop body, and it takes him exactly two scenes and one tear drop to accept his fate and to unquestionably become an experimental robot cop person andriod hybrid thing.

The rest of the movie, without getting spoilery about it, involves OmniCorp trying to develop Alex Murphy to be more robot-like and hence more efficient, while Alex Murphy’s body (and his soul?) fights against the programming without him even consciously trying (and then later consciously trying). Sellars and OmniCorp want to make a machine out of a man, but find that the man still fights to come through. And Alex Murphy starts to investigate his own attempted murder and that unravels a bunch of criminal shit, all of it in the end not very interesting and also being telegraphed from very far away, so that there are no surprises at all throughout this movie. If you feel like you know what’s going to happen next, it is because you already do. And not because this is a slavish remake, but because nothing feels original or unexpected in general. RoboCop is a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts, and this movie reflects that character in that it feels like a bunch of other more successful movies stitched together and then glossed over with a coat of slick black paint to make people not notice what’s going on underneath.

And about that black RoboCop look…what the -…why? Just…just why? The suit does not look better in black, a fact the movie acknowledges implicitly when it is all said and done. It even looks more plastic-y and fake, less like he’s in a metal suit or more like he’s wearing body armor a la Batman. So all black robosuit is a fail. Just a damn ugly looking fail. Plus that hand.

THAT HAND! Okay this actually does bring me to one of the few things I genuinely enjoyed and was actually surprised about. There is a scene in which it is revealed to Alex Murphy what physical parts of his body were used inside the suit, and it is a pretty startling reveal and kind of upsetting to look at, as it should be. This scene along with a later scene featuring some brain surgery gave this movie kind of a cool 1980’s body horror type of vibe, and that was unexpected but still worked very well and actually gave me hope that this movie would have more surprises like that one singular thing (spoiler alert: nope, no more surprises). BUT for whatever reason, one that they didn’t really bother to explain (or perhaps there was a throwaway line of exposition that I missed), despite going to great lengths to show Alex Murphy as well as us the audience how little of his body was used, THEY STILL KEPT THAT HAND! Why? What the fuck? Was blood running down the roboarm to his hand? Did they need to find another way to make this super robofighter even more vulnerable somehow, give him an additional weak spot? The one human hand sticking out from the rest of the suit looks downright stupid, like Robo lost his glove or something.

The only reason I can think of for this off-putting and illogical detail would be this movie, and many other remakes or reboots or whatever, is the desire to make references to the movie that came before. For example in the recent “Star Trek Into Darkness,” which was a loose remake of “Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan,” felt compelled to have a character scream “Khaaaaan!” like William Shatner did the first time around. Even a movie with esoteric roots in previous films like “The Expendables” features characters saying their own famous lines from famous films. “RoboCop” feels compelled to call back to some iconic lines of dialogue and other elements from the original film, but also decided to INVERT these things,. For example, instead of “I’d buy that for a dollar,” a character says “I wouldn’t buy that for  a dollar.” Murphy’s partner Officer Anne Lewis becomes Officer Jack Lewis. The ED-209s are actually efficient. Instead of old Robocop’s hand crushing a corporate stooge’s hand in a Robo handshake, new RoboCop offers to shake hands with a douchey guy and the guy DOESN’T TAKE THE BAIT. D’oh! Didn’t see THAT one coming, didja?

And that fucking HUMAN HAND. This MUST have just been a weird call back. Remember when Miguel Ferrer tells the scientist peeps in “Robocop” to “lose the arm,” despite the fact that the scientists were able to save it? It is a quick little scene but said a lot about how corporations view people and the way they felt they could treat people, which is to say like property, like meat, simply ready to be hacked down and fed into a machine in order to support the system and make the overseers rich. But in this new “RoboCop,” they DID save the hand, it was pretty much the only thing that got saved, and for what reason? Why? Couldn’t be more dexterity because the movie starts with a guy playing an acoustic guitar with his robot hands, so if that guy could make a G chord on the guitar, Robo could pull a trigger, naa’amean? So it is a dumb bullshit detail that looks stupid, makes no sense, and misses the point of the original. Kind of emblematic of the whole endeavor.

Plus the PG-13 rating. So lame. Of course no one was going to fork over $100+ million to make an R-rated “RoboCop” because the dirty secret of R-rated movies is that they don’t make that much money, not compared to those PG-13 behemoths. If this thing could have been made for $50 million, an R-rating would have been doable because the threshhold for profitability is so much lower. And make no mistake, when this movie was greenlit, it was merely profits and bottom lines that the purse string holders saw, not any sort of artistic integrity or a desire to make an actually good movie. Good enough, surely, to make money, but not necessarily good.

And with a PG-13 rating comes PG-13 style violence, which I have come to find much more repulsive and socially careless than all of Scorsese’s and Tarantino’s most violent movie moments combined. It is actually very reprehensible to show so much violence and carnage in a movie, especially of the gun variety, without a single drop of blood. There are absolutely no consequences whatsoever to the gun play in this movie. Sure tons of folks get shot and presumably killed, but it happens bloodlessly, allowing for that PG-13 rating, allowing for teenagers to watch a movie that in the end does glorify the violence it portrays because it refuses to show the consequences of the violence. There were at least two action scenes (one that featured Robo vs a bunch of droids) that came across decidedly as video game footage, which is as fake as it gets. One of these scenes, which is shot mostly in the dark, looked awesome, but again featured tons of people being mowed down by guns and we don’t see one iota of what actually happens when someone gets shot in this movie.

And by the way, that action scene set in the dark…oh boy…another shining example of what is wrong with this movie. The whole scene is shot in the dark because it looks cool, we get to cut back and forth between the bad guys’ night vision goggles, Robo’s own night vision thing, and shots of the dark room being lit up by gun fire. Okay, cool looking for sure. I’ll give them that. But when you think about this scene, it is as dumb as it gets. The bad guys wanted to give themselves the tactical advantage against Robo by killing the lights and using night vision goggles. Okay. That works great with, you know, actual people. But this is RocoCop. His first name is ROBO. And furthermore, these bad guys all know who RoboCop is and what he is capable of, as he’s already been in the news and they were even tipped off that he was on the way. Did these idiots really think that the scientists who made this thing would not have given the FUCKING ROBOT COP some FUCKING NIGHT VISION?

Okay, it literally took me about seven seconds to do a search on the interwebs and apparently night vision was invented in 1954. This movie is set in 2028. So clearly this scene was not put in the movie because it was smart, it was put in because it looked cool, despite how dumb it is. Oh, and they knew RoboCop was all black, too. So why would darkness help them? It helps fucking RoboCop! He’s all black in a blacked out room! Idiots.

So yeah…that whole PG-13 thing…I get it financially, I understand why they did it, and it is a large reason why this thing ultimately does not work. The violence is too fake in the wrong way, and really the whole movie doesn’t feel like it has any teeth, there’s no bite to this thing. It’s like the Novak Element tv show segments they keep cutting to in the movie, with Samuel L. Jackson’s terrible looking hair, it felt like they were trying to lampoon the television show pundits and hosts on FOX News and MSNBC, but there was very little lampooning, it was really just a straight up character that would not feel out of place at all in today’s media landscape. This isn’t like “Network” being so over the top with its depiction of “television prophets” and faux reality news programming over thirty years ago feeling weirdly relevant and prescient today, this is just a transplanting of a known media type and using it to give the audience tons of exposition about drones and the state of the world in 2028. Basically its a waste.

This is the type of movie that seems to want to say something, but really doesn’t say a thing. Outside of the great opening with the suicide bombers and the complicit media covering the whole thing, there is nothing said about the state of the world, the use of drones overseas, or even the use of drones in America. There are even a few scenes dedicated to some sort of debate in America about the use of drones and whether a bill banning them in America should be repealed, but we don’t actually see any people in relation to this debate, we are just told “40% of people are now for drones” and so forth. It’s weird and again a waste. Nothing was focused on and it all went by in a blurry mess.

I’m actually not even going to get into how weird it was that Alex Murphy’s wife would be SO OPEN to having a giant robot man for a husband and father to her child. When they first get together, there’s a scene in which Alex Murphy, as RoboCop, sits in a car, nervous to go inside to see his family for the time since his transformation, as if he was a school kid getting ready to pick up his date for prom. Because that’s what we want to see. A nervous, weepy RoboCop. And then he does see his wife, and she hugs him, placing her face on his chest, and all I could think was “I wonder if he’s cold. Or does he run hot? What’s it like to hug a robot man?” How could anyone take that scene seriously. That one scene almost reaches a level of camp that could have helped the movie, but alas it was there and gone.

Anyway, disappointing to say the least. Downright dumb to say the worst.

*Nevermind the easily researchable fact that not only do Americans support drone strikes overseas (including against American citizens on foreign soil), but they also overwhelmingly support unarmed drone use right here in the U.S.