Okay, so it didn't completely suck. The intro was badass, and Samuel L Jackson plays his part to perfection, as do Keaton and Oldman. No, my main problem with the movie is RoboCop himself.
RoboCop throughout this remake is a miserable, self-pitying emo-bot. Granted, he’s got a lot to be annoyed about – it can’t be too pleasant to survive a car bombing and find out that you are nothing more than a face, brain, lungs and an unloved hand. But after half an hour of watching Murphy coming to terms with his situation, I was internally screaming that enough is enough and that he should accept it like a man, fourth-degree burns be damned.
As a full human, Murphy starts the film angry and annoyed at an investigation going wrong. He is then annoyed and angry at being turned into RoboCop. That follows an extended sequence where he is angry and annoyed while he solves his own murder. He is then angry and annoyed at the police sergeant for setting him up. And after he is switched off by Maddox, he awakens very angry and annoyed as he takes on Omnicorp directly. I fully accept that he has a lot to be unhappy about but watching him drive around on his motorbike like a teenager throwing a tantrum only brought it home how petulant his behaviour was and how ungrateful he was at being given a second chance at life.
The fact that the film gives very little reason to actually feel sorry for him doesn’t help. In the original RoboCop, Murphy dies a slow and horrible death that involves his hand and arm being blown off. He then awakes as a machine and has lost all his humanity. He’s encased in a metal shell that gives him superhuman strength, a CPU in the brain and invulnerability to bullets but given the choice, it’s not desirable. He’s a Frankenstein’s monster. At no point do you think that he’s better as RoboCop than Alex Murphy. And to top it off, he’s lost his family.
Compared to the new RoboCop who awakens with all his memories intact, the ability to jump enormous distances, run really fast and indulge in feats of cat-like agility; he’s more of a superhero than a tragic victim. Physically he is better in every way than when he was a mere human. Once he’s got over the shock, what exactly does he have to be upset about? Considering the state he was left in after the explosion, he should have been on his knees thanking Dr Norton for the body he woke up in. But instead we get scene after scene of him running or riding away from his problems and with the same look on his face that you see on any toddler who hasn’t received the Christmas present they wanted.
He can still have a family life, and sure, he ain't getting laid anymore, but it’s better than being dead. His wife hasn’t rejected him, his son still calls him dad. The suit and the powers it gives him are awesome. He’s not confined to a wheelchair or facing years of rehabilitation that other people who have limbs blown off.
So what’s his fucking problem?
The other problem I had with the film is the fact that they watered the shit out of the violence. No one, at any point, gets his hand blown off. No-one falls into a vat of toxic sludge and gets sprayed across the bonnet of a car. With the original’s reputation for exploding so many blood squibs that they should have got a credit in the end titles, the news that this RoboCop was aiming for a 12-A rating was a firm kick in the nuts. Ultra-violence and RoboCop go together like booze and a kebab. Is it possible to make a tame RoboCop film? They tried with RoboCop 3 and the TV series, and look how successful they were (Hint - they sucked). The lack of actual violence is more than noticeable and you begin to miss it as the film goes on. After the promising opening where we see a child get gunned down in a shower of bullets from ED-209, even though the gore is hidden behind a cloud of smoke, the implied violence does the trick and you are left optimistic for what’s to come. However, as the film drags on, you witness RoboCop shoot lots of other robots but almost all humans are 12-A tasered. No blood splatters anywhere unless they’re from a far off distance. Even the final confrontation with the ED-209s looks like a trailer for a new Crisis game.
Let that sink in for a minute. RoboCop doesn't carry his lethal-as-balls fully-automatic handgun that comes out of a holster inside his leg. He carries a fucking taser.
While usually the lack of gore and violence isn’t enough to break a movie, it’s difficult to accept a RoboCop movie that’s made safe for children. It feels patronising to see the camera turn away as someone gets shot. RoboCop should be a franchise for adults, and the OTT violence was what made the original so appealing to 80’s kids. Like the Total Recall remake, the pressure from the studio to make this film family friendly is one of the main reasons no one will care about it in a year’s time.
Finally, and, to my mind, most damning of all, is the whole point of RoboCop as a law-enforcement officer at all. Detroit in the original RoboCop was a crime ridden, economically deprived, pit of a city. Sadly in real life, the current state of Detroit is not far off from Verhoeven’s depiction. Detroit even filed for bankruptcy in 2013 and there are very little signs of recovery anytime soon. So you would think that with RoboCop being set in Detroit, it would be a no brainier for any writer or director to use Detroit’s plight as the backdrop for the movie. It would make a far more interesting setting than the ‘off-the-shelf’ city that Jose Padilha went with. Crisp and clean, Detroit could have been LA, Chicago or a futuristic London. It was Detroit because the subtitle told us.
Showing us that crime was rampant would have given the pro-robot argument in the film an extra dimension. Other than corporate greed, the viewer would have been challenged that maybe robots are necessary and that Omnicorp might be thinking about their profit margin, but maybe deploying robots is just what a city like Detroit needs. It would also have given RoboCop a few more interesting criminals to take down rather than the couple of dull scenes we were presented with.
Detroit in this RoboCop looks like a pleasant place to live. We don’t see any street crime take place, it’s mostly sunny and it appears to have had a lot of investment. So why would Detroit need a RoboCop? A boring, clean and bland Detroit renders RoboCop unnecessary. That might be why we see RoboCop do very little in actual crime-fighting in the film.
All this, to me, adds up to major disappointment. I have the original RoboCop movies on Blu-Ray; think I'll watch the first two tonight, and, like every other "reboot" the world has for some reason produced, ignore that the latest movie even happened at all.
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