I saw this with mixed expectations. After all, everyone and their grandmother was expecting this reboot of the Robocop franchise to pale in comparison to the 1987 original. However, I’m willing to give any new take on a classic a fair shake. In the end, I walked out of the theater feeling as if there isn’t a definitive grade for Robocop.
Now, if I had to try to give people a guesstimate of how good or bad it was, I’d say somewhere in between average and good. Speaking of good, let me tell you what I enjoyed: the contemporary, or more likely soon to be very contemporary themes dealing with the use of drone or robot technology to enforce the law of humans was very crafty on the part of the writers.
Second, the return of Michael Keaton to feature films was great to see. His manipulative, and ruthless character, Raymond Sellers, as CEO of Omnicorp should remind all of us the guy can flat out act in any type of role thrown his way.
Other facets to this film that are worth mentioning deal with the deeper exploration of what kind of psychological horror a man is put through after being transformed into a machine. For those that don’t remember the original, the main character, Alex Murphy, who is a Detroit cop, played this time by Joel Kinnaman, is all but killed when his car explodes in flames.
The leftovers of his body are used to create the first man/machine police officer, all in the name of getting the public to buy into allowing more of these types of law enforcement to roam their city streets at night. As compared to the original Robocop, I think this remake did a vastly superior job to showing more of the evolution he goes through while coming to grips to life as cyborg, along with the emotional loss of not being able to interact with his family like he used to. So it’s got that going for it at least.
Also, before I dive into the bad I must mention a scene I found to be very charming and sentimental. Just as Murphy is adrift in dreamland, hooked up in a lab as he’s about to wake up for the first time as Robocop, he thinks he’s on the back patio of his house among friends, colleagues, and his absolutely stunning wife, played by Abbie Cornish. Anyway, as this scene plays out, none other than Frank Sinatra’s “Fly me to the Moon” is blaring, and it definitely hit a nerve with me.
Kinnaman does a nice job portraying Murphy here, showing a man who was truly in love with the life he had with his family, along with a short-lived slow dance with his wife before he’s woken up by the always great Gary Oldman, who plays Dr. Dennett Norton. The scene had heart, and I wish this film had a few more moments like this one.
Now for the bad, I think a lot of the action scenes, although choreographed well, fell flat. Maybe it was too many shots of Robocop speeding through the night on his Robobike that reminded me too much of the more recent Batman films, or maybe those types of shots lacked enough of a memorable soundtrack to help transform me into the scenes more, but either way, something was missing. I also thought the Samuel L. Jackson character, media mogul Pat Novak, came off as annoying versus enjoyable. By the time the last scene of the film that included him rolled, I had enough of the guy for some reason.
Look, in the end, this wasn’t a bad film by any means. I’ll need to revisit it at a later time to see if I enjoy it more, or less than my first outing, but overall, I honestly can’t recommend you either see it on the big screen, or wait for home release. It’s too close to call in my opinion, but if nothing else, nothing was done here to tarnish the original that was released some 27 years ago!
Final grade: B-
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