RoboCop Review: All Action Films Should Strive For As Much Substance

RoboCop stars Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a good, honest cop in the crime-ridden and corrupt [...]

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stars Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a good, honest cop in the crime-ridden and corrupt city of Detroit. Murphy and his partner, Jack Lewis (Michael K. Williams) are going hard after local crime boss Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow) until Lewis is injured during a shootout. Vallon's men find Murphy's car at the hospital and rig it with explosive. That night, the car explodes in Murphy's driveway, taking most of his body with it. That's where mega-corporation OmniCorp steps in. OmniCorp has made a fortune selling defense robots to police the streets of countries around the globe, but hasn't been able to make headway in the United States because citizens dislike the idea of a weaponized, soulless machine making judgment calls on city streets. OmniCorp is in danger of losing any chance of tapping the American market forever as Senator Hubert Dreyfuss (Zach Grenier) is pushing through a bill making robots totally illegal on the streets of the United States. That's when OmniCorp's CEO, Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) has an idea: if they can create a robot with a human element then, maybe, they can market it to the American public as a human/robot hybrid hero that gets around the anti-robot laws and sways public opinion. He turns to medical prosthetics researcher Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) to make the project happen. Though Norton, at first, protests, he is quickly swayed when Sellars offers funding for his medical research, and soon they are turning Officer Alex Murphy into RoboCop. RoboCop is very much an action movie, but it is a surprisingly intelligent one. Rather than trying to recapture what Paul Verhoeven accomplished in 1987, Director José Padilha (Elite Squad, Bus 174) decided to bring the character and the concept of RoboCop into the 21st century and examine what it means in the here and now. Where Verhoeven's RoboCop felt like science fantasy, Padilha's film feels like it could be a future reality, grounded in the cutting edge prosthetics technology of today and relevant at the dawn of the era of drone warfare. The film's opening scene in Tehran, where some of OmniCorp's robots are making random patrols on the street, is a perfect encapsulation of its relevance. To see an entire population made docile, technically safe but totally subjugated, is chilling, and the machines' inability to differentiate between a suicide bomber and a child wielding a knife is a startling reminder of the dangers of detaching humanity from warfare.

Doctor Dennett Norton

Dr. Norton's initial reluctance is another smart addition to the film. As a doctor, Norton doesn't want anything to do with producing weapons, but how often do we continue to fund military technology in the hopes of finding domestic use? These initial scenes put the moral and philosophical questions that Padilha wants to address front and center, but soon they are pushed back. They're never abandoned, but they are less front-and-center as the film moves out of District 9 territory and makes a stop in Bad Boys territory to establish the relationship between Murphy and Lewis. These scenes are easily the film's low point, as it forgets its intelligence for a moment to indulge a clichéd super-cop routine. Luckily, it doesn't take long to move past this bit of origin and onto RoboCop's creation, where the film really finds its narrative stride. There are some chilling scenes as Murphy realizes what he has become and how little of his organic body remains. Kinnaman is quite convincing in the role, giving RoboCop an amount of pathos that you might not expect. Once returned to Detroit, RoboCop rides around the city on a motorcycle, cleaning up the streets and gaining the trust of the people in a "hero's rise" arc not unlike that in The Dark Knight, until RoboCop's man and machine elements begin to clash and the film begins building to its climax. The action sequences are tight, abandoning heavy gore for fast-paced, kinetic and tightly choreographed sequences, featuring a lot of gunplay, which feels efficient in the way a robotic soldier's movements should. They look great, with the only exception being whenever someone takes to the air. Anytime a human leaves the ground, the CG effects make him look a little bit like a rubber puppet, breaking immersion, but this is infrequent, somewhat expected, and a minor flaw in otherwise captivating scenes. The films visual design is striking. RoboCop's new design may be a bit less memorable than the original, but it certainly helps ground the film with its sleek, tactical look. The motorcycle design and weapons all fit together well and help make RoboCop something you truly believe a criminal would be terrified of. The principal characters are all well written and performed as well. Keaton's Raymond Sellars is a wonderful villain. The character is written to desire profit without any sort of mustache-twirling dreams of power and world-domination, and Keaton performs in a way that makes him not entirely unlikable, as the best villains tend to be. Oldman's Dr. Norton is suitably conflicted, constantly being tugged back and forth between his desire to help Alex and his family and his desire to see his research funded by Sellars. The conflict only grows as his relationship to Alex evolves and the moral weight on his shoulders grows heavier

Pat Novak

Sam Jackson's role as Pat Novak is a sly satire of cable news pundits, extrapolating the current state of media to its logical conclusion: a partisan pedagogue standing in front of a holographic stage in a performance that feels more like a corporate keynote address than a newscast. And, of course, you don't hire Samuel L. Jackson unless you want him to act like Samuel L. Jackson, so there's some of that thrown in as well, which fans will love and detractors will dismiss. The family dynamic, meant to humanize RoboCop, is a little weak. The performance by Abbie Cornish as Alex's wife, Clara, is stellar, but we're not really given much introduction to their relationship. The first scene that she is in is the same scene that has Alex being blown up, so we never really have a chance to get invested in their relationship. When Clara shows up later, angry that she hasn't seen much of Alex since he became RoboCop, Cornish is convincingly upset, but it feels more like she's upset that she and her son were stood up for dinner than because she's lost her husband, and no one ever really gets into the discussion of what it means to be married to a nearly fleshless robot, which feels like a missed opportunity. The relationship ends up feeling perfunctory, done in an effort to give RoboCop a human attachment but not developed to its full potential. Some viewers may also find the resolution of Alex Murphy's central conflict a bit questionable as well, in that it essentially involves the human spirit somehow managing to override computer code. It's a film, and some viewers will be more than happy to allow it that leeway, but to let "the indomitability of the human spirit" stand as its own explanation does seem a little off for a film that tries so hard to ground itself in reality. But then again, maybe allowing this development to go unexplained is less intrusive on the film than burdening it with a pseudoscientific explanation that invites overly-critical examination of an otherwise authentic world. It's easy to have low expectations a remake. They too often retread old ground while somehow forgetting what made that ground so interesting or fun to tread on in the first place. RoboCop smartly avoids that trap by starting from the same place as the original film, but then forging its own unique and distinct path alongside the original rather than trying to ride on top of it. Padilha's film is not meant to replace or update Verhoeven's cult classic, but to reexamine the concept trough fresh and modern eyes. Despite some small flaws, it is entertaining to watch for the visceral action and surprisingly philosophical, leaving you with something to think about after the credits roll. All action films should strive to have at least as much substance as RoboCop, and all remakes should strive for such vision.

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