RoboCop (2014)

Back when Paul Verhoeven’s “RoboCop” was released in 1987, the cyborg was described on the ads as a “stainless steel unstoppable Clint Eastwood.” As those who are fans of the original, they can tell you that it wasn’t “Dirty Harry” with a robot, but just as original co-writer Edward Neumeier said in an interview, it was a “stealth satire.” The filmmakers used comic-book hyperbole to make a near-future urbanscape ruled by corporations that own the police, and entertained by ridiculous “infotainment,” as said by Margot Harrison. It feels more psychic all the time.

The surprising news about the “RoboCop” remake, which came out about a month ago, is that director José Padilha and writer Joshua Zetumer have embraced that satire. They could have simply retold the famous story of a Detroit police officer who dies in the line of duty and is revived as a robot to kill the bad guys. Instead, they’ve brought the original’s anticorporate tendency to the fore and made it topical. What gets lost though, unfortunately, is, as Harrison put it, “a strong narrative with compelling characters.”

Set in 2028, the film opens with an O’Reilly-esque TV instigator, played by Samuel L. Jackson, praising a new generation of humanoid drones that the U.S. uses to control its enemies around the world. Why, he demands, won’t legislators allow these peacekeeping machines on American territory?

CEO of OmniCorp, Raymond Sellars, played by Michael Keaton, is equally eager on accommodating Americans to permanent occupation by his crime-fighting robots. But voters have speculations with these robots making life-and-death decisions. So Sellars and his biotech expert, played by Gary Oldman, plan a compromise: a machine controlled by the resident brain of a real, live cop.

After getting blown up with his car that was planned by a drug lord, detective Alex Murphy, played by Joel Kinnaman, is the perfect candidate. But he isn’t given a choice about being resurrected from near-dead as the RoboCop. In the film’s most graphic moment, Murphy see’s what’s left of his human body inside the robotic steel and begs to be dead.

Concerned about the human emotions that will get in the way, OmniCorp gradually limits Murphy’s free will, leaving him an appearance of independence for PR purposes. While it’s not enough to convince his wife, played by the beautiful Abbie Cornish, everyone else likes the way RoboCop cleans up the streets just fine.

The remake of “RoboCop” isn’t really about the mean streets of Detroit – which came across far cleaner and less mean than they did in the original. It’s not as profane, violent or funny, either. The action feels automatic. Murphy’s partner (Michael K. Williams), boss (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) and drug-lord enemy (Patrick Garrow) are indistinct, ill-formed characters.

Oddly, the movie comes most alive in the parts dealing with OmniCorp’s internal politics, where Oldman (is described by Harrison as a modern-day Dr. Frankenstein) negotiates between Sellars’s demands and his sympathy for Murphy. We as an audience feel that sympathy as well, but at the film’s midpoint, Murphy’s head has been tinkered with so much that we don’t know who or what is the protagonist.

Kinnaman uses his face more than Peter Weller did in the original, and he’s expressive enough to give back for his stomping metal body. The problem is that, having set up RoboCop as a drone whose humanity has been heartlessly programmed out, Padliha and Zetumer can’t figure out how to give him back the meaningful agency their plot demands, or how to restore the audience’s connection with him. They get to the conclusion only by cheating.

It’s rare to see a remake that takes chances or has ideas, and for that, “RoboCop” deserves credit. By the midpoint (when Murphy becomes RoboCop, which is where it starts to slow down), in fact, its ideas have swamped the story, leaving the actors to struggle through a confused third act. On the upside, at least we know it wasn’t written by a cyborg – only humans could mess up this creatively.

In the end, the action is really well-done, the main characters (Murphy, his wife and son, played by John Paul Ruttan) are likeable, and the story of RoboCop getting back with his family is followed up in here. Jackie Earle Haley, who you will remember as Rorschach from “Watchmen” and Freddy Kruegar from the “Nightmare on Elm Street” remake, is in here playing one of the OmniCorp villains, and he is just a joy to watch. My rating for this remake would probably be a 6, since I give it credit for trying. There is effort put into this remake. Go see it when it comes out on DVD, it’s worth the rental, especially since 2 and 3 were horrible.

I saw this in the theater with an old friend and we were sitting in the back while there was one other person that was sitting in the front. I will admit that I'm never going to the theater with this friend again because of how aggravating he got a lot of the times.

Thanks for joining in on “RoboCop Month.” I hope you all enjoyed it, stay tuned for more of my reviews. I’ll see you next time.

RoboCop 3

There is a certain weariness that starts to get on sequels after a time.

While some movie characters seem to be able to keep going on for all eternity, like James Bond, others get old real fast. Robocop, for example, is a character whose narrow magnitude has been worn out. There is so much that you can do for this half-man, half-robot who, as Ebert described, “walks like a child’s toy,” and eventually disobeys his programming in order to fight for the good guys.

“RoboCop 3,” released in 1993, is set once again in Detroit, where, despite the accomplishments recorded in “RoboCop” and “RoboCop 2,” things are even worse. So bad, indeed, that the city has more or less been sold to the evil Omni Consumer Products corporation, which even owns the police force.

OCP’s grand design, as the movie starts, is to relocate thousands of nice folks in a colorful neighborhood, and build on the ashes of their homes the towers of Delta City, a high-rise development that seems plagiarized directly from the covers of back issues of “Amazing Stories.” (OCP has undeniably studied the huge victory of other megalomaniac high-rise growths in Detroit.) The people who live in the neighborhood understandably hate OCP’s plans, which are carried out by deadly strike forces who throw out tenants on pain of death. One little child, for example, who is an orphan, is left to wander through the mean streets after OCP’s wrecking crews have killed her parents. Meanwhile, in the sewers beneath the city streets, another culture struggles to survive. This civilization, who dresses like 1960s hippies, are against dictatorship and mega-corporations, and are fighting rebel combat against the industrial pigs.

There are some moments of humor in “RoboCop 3,” like when an executive hangs up his phone and jumps out his window. And it’s fun watching the great Rip Torn, as Omni’s CEO. He walks, talks, smiles and thinks exactly like, how Ebert put it, “the producer of the Larry Sanders Show,” a role he was probably performing more or less simultaneously. (Because “RoboCop 3” gives him little else to do, this is a wise acting decision on his part.) RoboCop, you may recall, was once a normal human Detroit policeman, until large parts of his anatomy were lost in the battle against evil. Now equipped with machine-tooled body parts and a computer-assisted brain, he looks like a robot, except for his mouth and chin, which are left exposed, probably to pay tribute to the superhero costumes that do that, like Batman or the Flash. He clanks about the city, speaking like an automated elevator, and despite the efforts of Detroit’s best programmers he keeps having flashbacks to his family – memories that bring back his human side, and cause him to side with people he likes.

RoboCop was played by Peter Weller in the first two movies, which Ebert said, “he confided in me were the worst experiences in his life - not because of the screenplay, but because of the costume, which caused him to sweat gallons even though air-conditioners were trained on him between takes.” In this one he was replaced by Robert John Burke, star of “Simple Men,” by the independent filmmaker Hal Hartley. This may be too high a price to pay to enter the Hollywood mainstream. Nancy Allen is also back again, as RoboCop’s partner, Lewis, in a role that grows more thankless with every sequel. Both of them don’t do that good of a job in this one, I’m sorry to say.

Why do they continue on making these retreads? This is the answer Ebert gave: “Because "RoboCop" is a brand name, I guess, and this is this year's new model. It’s an old tradition in Detroit to take an old design and slap on some chrome.”

Another complaint that fans gave on the second one is that there was just one scene where RoboCop’s wife comes in and they never follow up on it. In this one, they give RoboCop a surrogate wife and child, which is a terrible idea. That was a huge part of the storyline that they just passed on and never followed up on it. In the end, this one gets a 0; it’s the worst in the series and one of the worst sequels ever made.

Now that I finally got that out of the way, check in next week when I talk about the remake.

RoboCop 2

Now we come to “RoboCop 2,” released in 1990, which is a strange combination of violence and humor. You could say that this film has a split personality, first showing gruesome scenes and then moving ahead as if that part didn’t mean anything. This is a movie where one part shows a tycoon announcing his plan to “take Detroit private,” and another part shows RoboCop taking the brains of his enemy out of their artificial head and smashes them into the pavement. The movie’s strategy is to switch the laughs and the gore, so that right after the brains are smashed, there’s a line of funny dialogue.

Apart from everything else, the very idea of RoboCop is funny, which as the late Roger Ebert put it: “There's a human tendency to be amused by anything that seems to be intelligent but is actually governed by laws of behavior it doesn't understand. That's why we like plastic teeth that chatter when we wind them up, and stupid pet tricks. RoboCop is a creature like that: An incredibly expensive, complicated piece of machinery and computer circuits that stomps around Detroit making all of the wrong decisions.”

The story begins this time with Detroit at a moment where it looks in even worse shape than at the end of the first movie. There’s a citywide police strike, in protest of pay cuts thought up by the evil Omni Consumer Products Company, a massive company that was to replace cops with RoboCops and take over Detroit in the process. OCP’s CEO is the Old Man, played by Daniel O’Herlihy, a magnate, who Ebert says, “whose vision would make Mike Milliken envious.” He’ll force the city into bankruptcy, take it over at a good deal price, and strip it of its property.

This plot doesn’t really have much to do with the main quarrel in “RoboCop 2,” which is between Cain, played by Tom Noonan, the inventor of a popular new drug, and the forces of justice represented by RoboCop, reprised by Peter Weller. Cain’s sidekicks include a violent, foul-mouthed young boy, played by Gabriel Damon, who looks like he is around the age of 12 but kills people without shame, Ebert says he “swears like Eddie Murphy,” and eventually takes over the drug business. Ebert says in his review, “I hesitate to suggest the vicious little tyke has been shoehorned into this R-rated movie so that the kiddies will have someone to identify with when they see it on video, but stranger things have happened.”

The movie’s screenplay is a confusion of half-baked and unfinished ideas. The most distracting loose end is the idea that Murphy, the cop whose cyborg part has been recycled into RoboCop, may still be human after all. He acts like he is – driving past his house to look at his wife like he wants to return to her – but then they reprogram him so that he knows that he is only a machine. The way he says that makes us suspect that he’s trying to mess around with his programmers, but then the whole plot thread is taken out and we never find out if he’s really human or not.

Then there’s the question of who makes a good RoboCop. After the first success of the original model one prototype RoboCop after another self-destructs. They get suicidal, according to the scientists in the movie, because they do not have the strength for a sense of duty. That’s why Murphy’s character made such a good RoboCop. Since each RoboCop costs possibly millions to develop, the corporation can’t waste all of that money on doubtful material.

Alright, but then why do they decide to turn Cain, a drug dealer, into a robot? He’s completely high on the drugs all of the time, but they rob him of his brain and put it in a big, mean robot for no apparent reason, but Ebert speculates that they could have a new cyborg for RoboCop to go up against in the finale. Ebert mentions, “The bad robot has a head that looks like a Nazi helmet; did its inventors know they were manufacturing a villain?” The finale dialogue of the movie tells untold thousands of machine-gun bullets, most of them fired at the bad robot despite the fact that it’s clearly resistant to bullets. The evil little tyke gets a tender deathbed scene, no doubt out of respect to his tender years. The magnate and his strategists get the idea of putting the entire blame on the female scientist, played by Belinda Bauer, but the movie ends before they can.

And we never find out if RoboCop has true human feelings or not. What a way to leave the audiences who loved the first one and wanted to figure that out in this one. Dimwits!

You know what, we don’t really see RoboCop that much in this movie, because Ebert suggested that he “rebelled against the inhuman ordeal of wearing that heavy metal suit any longer than necessary.” What we do see are a handful of violent moments and action, lots of dialogue from the minor characters that doesn’t pay off, and so many humorous TV ads for the world of the future. The ads are funny – especially the one that opens the movie. You know the recurring “I’ll buy that for a dollar” one. Ebert said, “I didn't much like "RoboCop 2" (the use of that killer child is beneath contempt), but I've gotta hand it to them: It's strange how funny it is, for a movie so bad. Or how bad, for a movie so funny.” I have to agree with him, because I wasn’t satisfied with this movie because not everything was resolved by the end.

In the end, I would say that “RoboCop 2” deserves a 5. Now hold on to your seats because next week will be the movie that was responsible for killing off this character for a long time, “RoboCop 3.”

RoboCop (1987)

Alright, everyone, this month is very special. Why, you ask? Well, because we are going to look at a film series that died with the third film, but was resurrected 27 years later. If you haven’t guessed by now, it’s none other than RoboCop. Today we are going to look at the 1987 masterpiece itself, “RoboCop.”

There is a moment early in the film when a robot behaves uncontrollably. It has been programmed to warn a criminal to drop his gun, and then shoot him if he doesn’t listen. The robot, which the late Roger Ebert describes as “an ugly and ungainly machine,” is wheeled into a board meeting of the company that hopes to make millions by selling it. A junior executive is picked to pull a gun on the robot. The robot gives the warning. The executive drops the gun. The robot repeats the warning, counts to five, and shoots the executive dead.

This is a very funny scene. (Whether it was even funnier before the MPAA Code and Ratings Administration demanded it to be re-edited, I think, is a debatable question). Ebert then says, “It is funny in the same way that the assembly line in Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" is funny - because there is something hilarious about logic applied to a situation where it is not relevant.”

Because the scene surprises us in a movie that looked as if it was becoming a serious thriller, it throws us off guard. We’re no longer 100% sure where “RoboCop” is going, and that’s one of the movie’s strong areas.

The film takes place at an unknown time in the future in Detroit, a city where gangs have increased. There have been several cops killed. A big corporation wants to put robot cops on the market, but the demonstrator prototype is obviously not the one to be taken in for the job.

A junior scientist, played by Miguel Ferrer, thinks he knows a better way to make a policeman, by combining robotics with a human brain. He gets his chance when Officer Alex Murphy, played by the great Peter Weller, is killed in the line of duty. Ok, not quite killed. There is a part of him that remains alive, and around that the first “RoboCop” is constructed – a half-man, half-machine that works with the perfect logic except for the scraps of human naturalness and instinct that may be waiting somewhere in the back of his memory.

Nancy Allen co-stars in the movie as Anne Lewis, Murphy’s partner before he was shot. She recognizes something familiar about RoboCop and eventually realizes what it is: Inside that titanium steel suit, it’s Murphy. In actuality, it shouldn’t have taken her this long to figure it all out, since Murphy’s original nose, mouth, chin and jaw are clearly visible. His inventor must have been a fan of Batman and Robin in the case that if you can’t see the eyes of someone you know, you’ll never recognize him.

The broad outline of the plot develops along more or less the lines of a standard thriller. But this is not a standard thriller. The director is Dutchman, Paul Verhoeven, who directed “Soldier of Orange” and “The Fourth Man.” You won’t be able to categorize his movies easily. This movie has comedy and slapstick comedy. There is romance. There is a large amount of philosophy, mainly focusing on the question, “What is a man?” In addition, there is political social satire, as the Robocop takes on some qualities and, as Ebert puts it, “some of the popular following of a Bernhard Goetz.”

Oddly enough, a lot of RoboCop’s personality is expressed by his bass-baritone voice, which is a mechanical monotone. Machines and robots have spoken exactly like that for years in cinema, and now life is beginning to mock them. Ebert confesses, “I was in the Atlanta airport a few weeks ago, boarding the shuttle train to the terminal, and the train started talking just like robocop, in an uninflected monotone. ("Your-attention-please-the-doors-are-about-to-close.")”

Ebert laughed at that, but no one else did. He says, “Since the recorded message obviously could have been recorded in a normal human voice, the purpose of the robotic audio style was clear: to make the commands seem to emanate from a pre-programmed authority that could not be appealed to.” In “RoboCop” Verhoeven and Weller get a lot of stuff out of the conflict between the completely solid voice and the increasingly confused person behind it.

Considering that he spends a good majority of the movie behind that robotic helmet, Weller does an outstanding job of creating sympathy for his character. He is more “human,” obviously, when he is RoboCop than before he became when he was an ordinary human being. His difficulty is appealing, and Nancy Allen is effective as the determined partner who wants to find out what really happened to him.

Most thriller and special-effects movies come right off the assembly line. You can call out every development ahead of time, and you’re usually right. “RoboCop” is a thriller with a difference.

If you haven’t seen this movie, what are you waiting for? Go out and see it. You’ll absolutely love it. I agree with James Rolfe, it’s one of the best shoot-‘em up movies ever made.

Stay tuned for next week when I continue “RoboCop” month.