I recently saw Robocop (2014) and felt I had to write something about it.
I’d kept my expectations rather low regarding this remake hoping that would allow the viewing to be less disappointing.
I mean I grew up seeing Robocop with Peter Weller, and thought “Robocop’s the Man“. The TV series wasn’t altogether bad either.
So this new incarnation of it surely had some hard competition.
First of: Joel Kinnaman (fellow swede) has stepped it up. He hasn’t really stood out before, but in this film I though he did a solid job. And I think he’s been doing some work with a voice coach to. Sounded less Swedish than in other films. He portraits Alex Murphy very good, with a lot of humanity and emotion, something that Peter Weller didn’t really get a chance to do, probably due to editing. Even if the element was obvious in the original film this movie felt more within (if only by a fraction) Alex Muphy.
Having said that however we come to my second point:
What the heck happened to the dystopic future? In my book, Robocop works so well because Verhoeven pushed so hard on the crappy future.
The police are corrupt and on strike, the populace is either doing drugs or making the drugs. No one has a brighter tomorrow ahead of them. And like a Metal Messias Robocop comes and saves the day.
This is totally absent in the remake, if anything they almost try to portrait the future (or is it almost present) as a brighter one.This involuntarily makes the Need and use of Robocop into something more like a toy. A gimmick perhaps. And the suit(or armour if you will) certainly makes him look like a toy. It looks like Batman and Daft Punk had a love child and conceived it in K.I.T.T. (for you ignorants that’s the K.A.R.R. from Knight Rider)(And those of you that got that joke- Well done you are a Nerd).
So this movie went from being a strong and poignant critique on society and humans to being a movie about greed and robots and guns and…
Yes it is in there but its tucked away so well between explosions and gunfights its rather hard to notice, but the main issue here is family and love and what it is to human. Also a little bit about ethics and greedy corporations. Just like in the original, it however surpasses this film in getting the massage to the viewer. In my opinion.
This movie sadly just became one of the other films that are just about making money. The one original idea I found worth mentioning about the remake is that they replaced the character Lewis, played by Nancy Allen, with a man also called Lewis played by Michael K. Williams. And I mention this because It’s a bad idea. Lewis in the original was hard, tough, and showed you that a woman could kick ass too. Now the character is just the stereotypic black co star who’s only contribution to the story is being shot. Basically that role is none essential. But the original Lewis was an integral part of Robocop.
We also see Gary Oldman, Samuel Jackson and Michael Keaton in this film. They are very good actors and do what they are paid to do. But even they cant revive this D.O.A., it really needed Euthanasia or a Script-transfusion.
PralinPappan 