Now, I enjoy a well-made, super-violent action picture as much as the next guy (or girl), but I reject the assertion that Robocop needs to be R-rated to be good. At its core, Robocop is the story of a half-man, half-cyborg who fights crime and battles big robots. That sounds cool. That sounds FUN. The thirteen-year old in me wants to see that movie, and there's no reason why the right filmmaker couldn't take that basic concept and turn it into an entertaining movie that reaches a wider audience.
Verhoeven's film worked because he (and Peter Weller, who played Murphy) made me care about the character. There's a scene in his film where Robocop is hurt, overpowered by a mini-army of cops who are just emptying clips into his metal body relentlessly. He tries to crawl his way to freedom, eventually throwing himself over the concrete wall of a parking garage. The music swells, and there's a desperation to it all that still chokes me up a bit. It's a violent scene, but what makes it effective is that personal investment. There are many other movies out there that can deliver on the over-the-top bloodshed if that's all you're looking for. But, those films aren't classics like Robocop because violence for the sake of it isn't enough. Ultimately, what Padilha needs to do more than anything is to get me to care about his new Murphy.
And if that is the litmus test, then Padilha comes up a bit short. The casting of Joel Kinnaman doesn't do him any favors either. I liked Kinnaman in the Netflix/AMC series The Killing, but he's the kind of actor that keeps you at arm's length even when he's not wearing a robot helmet. There's very little time before the transformation to identify with him and not enough harm done to him afterwards to make him that sympathetic. Abbie Cornish, who plays Clara, does her best as the distraught wife of Murphy, but her pleasantly round face and limited charisma reminds me of the interchangeable quality of bit-players from the studio era. She just makes no impression on me at all.
The supporting cast is better, especially Gary Oldman as Dr. Norton, an expert in robot prosthetics who develops the Robocop program (and the only character in the entire movie with an arc). He works for Michael Keaton's OmniCorp CEO, Raymond Sellars, who is using Robocop as a public relations tool, putting pressure on the Senate to repeal legislation that prevents the use of drone robots to patrol U.S. soil. That's where the real money is for OmniCorp, and Sellars will do anything to ensure its success. Helping him out is a fear-mongering Samuel Jackson, who plays Pat Novak, host of The Novak Factor, a futuristic Fox News-type program that is squarely in the OmniCorp camp. This is where Padilha goes to work, taking jabs at U.S. presence overseas, drone use and the dangers of dehumanizing war, and of course, the media. While these are ripe targets, Padilha dances around the ring too much without landing any significant blows, and there's a lack of focus to the storytelling in general that is more damaging than the memory of Robocop '87.
For those who have never seen the original, Robocop '14 will probably seem like passable, yet forgettable, entertainment. Padilha knows his way around an action scene, and the effects work is state of the art, but there's nothing memorable about the film. I'm afraid that (some) fans of the original will use that as a means of justifying their assumption that a PG-13 version was blasphemous. While I disagree, I certainly find myself on common ground with those who didn't care for the picture.
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