'RoboCop' Movie Review

"RoboCop" Movie Review: 3 Stars

by Michael Phillips

Intriguingly ambiguous in its rooting interests, the "RoboCop" remake doesn't really believe its own poster.

The tagline "Crime has a new enemy" suggests little more than point and shoot -- the same old cyborg song and dance. While nobody'd be dumb enough to reboot the original 1987 kill-'em-up franchise by holding back on the scenes of slaughter in favor of sly political satire about arm-twisting Fox News jingoism or American business ethics, Brazilian-born director Jose Padilha manages to do all that and still deliver the product.

That first, excitingly sadistic "RoboCop," directed by Paul Verhoeven, paved the way for one of the ugliest-spirited sequels ever, and a third, forgettable outing.

Now, working from a script by Joshua Zetumer based on the Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner ur-text, we have a movie taking place in the ever-popular near future, 14 years hence. We're back in Detroit. America's the lone, squishy-liberal holdout among first-world nations in the crime-fighting revolution deploying deadly peacekeeping robots and robotics. The airwaves are ruled by a Bill O'Reilly-type show, "The Novak Element," in which a paranoid visionary (Samuel L. Jackson in fantastic, "distinguished" anchorman hair) shills for the OmniCorp< company, the money behind the armed robots.

The company president (Michael Keaton) realizes the American public won't support robot police officers, unless they can package them as human-ish.

Joel Kinnaman of the television series "The Killing" plays Alex Murphy, the Detroit police detective critically injured by a car bomb and reconfigured, by Gary Oldman's kindly OmniCorp researcher, into the franchise title at hand.

There's a lot to enjoy here, though the brutality is very rough for a PG-13 rating. (The screening included an awful lot of clueless parents accompanied by an awful lot of preteens.) RoboCop becomes a pawn in the corporate game, as he was in the original film, but here the machinations and talk of focus groups and marketing strategies is more pronounced and pretty sharp. Most audiences will be content with the gamer-friendly set pieces, in which a fatality count snuggles itself into the upper-right corner of the screen.

Jackie Earle Haley plays the robot trainer/programmer, and he's one of several ace supporting players lifting "RoboCop" above the routine. The female roles aren't much, but they're not insulting, and they're handled with steely panache by Abbie Cornish (grieving, confused wife, since her husband's not technically dead), Marianne Jean-Baptiste (no-nonsense police chief) and the great Jennifer Ehle (icy business associate).

The script includes some interesting ideas about the researchers struggling to get RoboCop's medication doses at the right level, so he retains enough of his human side to be relatable to the public.

This is at heart a pretty sad movie. Verhoeven wouldn't be caught dead making you care about anything in his "RoboCop"; Padilha is after something different.

He shoots in a familiar shaky-cam style that might be called "early 'NYPD Blue.'" That I can do without. But unlike the recent, empty-headed "Total Recall" remake, for example, this movie comes at you with an idea or two, as well as every available gun blazing.

 

MPAA rating: PG-13 (for intense sequences of action including frenetic gun violence throughout, brief strong language, sensuality and some drug material). Running time: 1:56.

"RoboCop" takes place in the year 2028. OmniCorp is a huge company that is interested in making money, they come up with the idea of the RoboCop, that is half man and half robot. They see these RoboCops in every city making them tons of money. What happens though when there is still a man inside the gear? Will he fight for what is right?

'RoboCop' Movie Review & Movie Trailer