RoboCop

The big surprise is the powerful screenplay which squeezes all it can from the topic and the story even has some overlap of relevance. It takes a slightly different route to the original RoboCop and that certainly does no harm. Routine action is a little restrained, only letting go during the final battle with the chickens. Keaton and Oldman steal the movie, dominating the screen in their scenes together. Alex Murphy has also gone through a certain change. Although Kinnaman doesn’t equal Weller’s qualities, he puts on a really good performance. The ace up the sleeve is director José Padilha who, despite an exhausting struggle with the studio, was able to push a lot of ideas into the project (the studio rejected nine out of every ten ideas) and details that push RoboCop upward. Next time, give it freer rein and it’ll be bombastic. (06/02/2014)

It isn’t usual for an expensive blockbuster (and especially a remake of an action movie of the eighties) to put its money on ambiguous characters, a moral dilemma about the limits of “humanness" or a criticism of America as the self-proclaimed “global policemen who should clear up their own mess at home"; all of this of course (unfortunately) toned down to large-budget proportions and diluted by the mandatory (and superfluous) SFX action ingredient, but all in all the course they chose was still entertaining, I tell you. (07/02/2014)

Somewhere half-way. I don’t glorify Verhoeven’s classic, so I went into Padilha’s remake without prejudice, and yet it was unable to win me over in any significant way. As an action flick, the action scenes in Robocop aren’t exciting, and as a satire, it’s not sharp enough, even though it has some promising hints. Overall it’s unremarkably bland. (04/05/2014)

In the first half, RoboCop observes the psychology of transforming a human into a robot and addresses the issue of ethics without lacking the proper visual effectiveness. In the second half, the film speeds up and the well-built dramaturgy falls apart (with a twist that probably not even the creators – including the screenwriter – understand, when RoboCop chooses to address his own past over dealing with the ongoing crimes) and the interesting science-fiction movie becomes a dumb action flick. It seems as if José Padilha’s film was cut and shortened by the producers to satisfy more consumerist audiences who don’t need more than said dumb action. And that’s a pity. The cynical view of US foreign policy and a few good jokes (“I’m just from marketing!”) suggest that the new RoboCop could have been a worthy remake, cleverly reflecting society in the new millennium. (15/02/2014)

Values (moral, personal, familial), likable anti-American critique (toothless, inoffensive), action with only one truly distinctive scene (the warehouse), and the strangled potential of wanting to play out at least one of the themes a little stronger. Or, it’s a perfectly Hollywood fluffy nothing that is held afloat only by Kinnaman's undeniable charisma. 3 ½. (09/12/2014)