Aside from some very cosmetic similarities, this is quite a different film from the 1980 original. Gone is almost all of the satire, gone is the denunciation of corporate greed and corruption, gone is the 18-rated gore; in its place there's sentimentality, some nods towards the war on terror and the main theme, which is a battle between science and business. Gary Oldman plays the scientist upon who's work Detective Murphy's conversion into Robocop is based. At his heart he is a good guy trying to do good in the world, but he gets caught up in the world of trying to make a profit. In the process loses some of his humanity and sells out his work to the money men. When the new Robocop starts acting more like man than machine though, Omnicorp start panicking and try to eliminate their creation.
The film isn't entirely devoid of satire. Samuel L Jackson plays a sort of shock-jock television host in the mould of the Fox network, conflating his opinion with news and demanding that the US people allow robots on to the streets in place of traditional human cops. That's all the satire we get though, in what feels like a nod towards the mock news reports of a dystopian future from the original Robocop, It feels somewhat out of place though as the rest of the film is chocked full of sentimentality and takes itself much more seriously than its source material. Definitely good casting though, there's no one else I would want to cast if I needed someone just to shout into a camera.
My biggest criticism is probably that it takes far too long for the story to go anywhere interesting. It takes nearly 55 minutes for Robocop to actually appear on American soil, and even longer before he goes and solves any crimes or confronts any bad guys. A film like this shouldn't be messing around with showing us Robocop's training simulations, get him out of the streets shooting up bad guys. Is this an action film or isn't it?
I guess that's the crux really. It's a film that feels like script-writing-by-committee. It feels like someone wrote a script that was trying to be true to the satire of the original (note the Samuel L Jackson parts), but then a Holywood committee insisted on focusing on Murphy's wife and kid, then insisted on a chase sequence and removing any blood and gore so it can be a 12A. Not that the film lacks good action scenes, a gun battle rendered in thermal imagery looks very cool even if it borders on being a little too busy. But there just isn't enough of it. Where Robocop the original had showed us a crumbling city falling apart and our protagonist brutally dealing with the punks on the streets and corporate stooges alike, Robocop the new one shows us a prosperous city and Robocop using tasers to coerce the punks into telling him where to find the guy who tried to kill Murphy. The film's trying to be part satire, part science fiction, part action, and at the same time trying to have a sentimental heart. It just doesn't mesh together.
I guess I'm only disappointed because the film is called Robocop, and therefore associates itself with another film that's nothing like it. Anyone who remembers the ludicrous brutality of the ED-209 boardroom scene from the original Robocop will find nothing of that sort here. In 1987 Robocop wins the day by shoving a spike through the neck of his nemesis, his bloody chest emptying on to the ground. In 2014 Robocop wins the day by tasering a bunch of people and firing a bloodless bullet.
Don't expect much from this film.
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