RoboCop, 2014.
Directed by José Padilha.
Starring Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, and Michael K. Williams.
SYNOPSIS:
Police officer Alex Murphy suffers horrific injuries in an explosion and is rebuilt and part-robot, part-man in a bid to combat growing levels of crime in Detroit. But RoboCop is haunted by his own past and the corruption of the system that has created him.
José Padilha was clearly very interested in making a political movie about how media and corporations control every aspect of our lives and tell us what to think. Sadly he was contracted to make a RoboCop movie so he shoehorned in the part-man, part-machine (all cop) element and treated it like just another subplot to put focus on getting his message across. Yes, RoboCop plays second fiddle to the message in his own movie.
When Padhila isn’t overstating his political message, RoboCop can be a very smart piece of science fiction cinema that deals with the idea of human emotion versus computer programming. Where does the machine stop and where does the human begin etc. and when the movie is dealing with these issues, it really succeeds. Gary Oldman’s Dennet Norton holds the majority of the story stakes as his design to resurrect slain officer Alex Murphy (a pretty underwhelming Joel Kinnerman) at the request of Omnicorp and its CEO Raymond Sellers (Michael Keaton) starts to become self aware and go against program. No matter what they do to slow him down, his emotion is always present and overrides the system. It’s a plot thread that isn’t new and RoboCop certainly isn’t doing anything different with it, but the script does it justice and it’s certainly the most interesting aspect of the movie.
However, the problems behind RoboCop becomes apparent when you realise that Padhila was so focused on the movie’s themes (corporations, media, man versus machine etc.) that the actual plot of the movie is almost perfunctory. We are given no reason to care about Murphy’s death because the movie rushes its way through the opening twenty minutes which means his life, his job and his family are never established. And because of this, we have no reason to care about his revenge. Furthermore, RoboCop crams in thirty minutes worth of story into the space of five so we get a generic bad guy, his criminal organisation, his plan, the corrupt cops who work for him, Murphy’s plan to arrest him, the failed attempt to do so and the subsequent car bombing told in one fell swoop and none of it is given time to breath. Before you know it, Murphy is in the suit and the science fiction themes take over leaving the supposed bad guy to be dealt so much later in the movie that you actually forgot he was in it.
This is why it feels like Padhila had no interest in making a RoboCop movie – because every time he’s forced to do so he rushes his way through it so he can get back to his themes. Scenes of boardroom meetings about focus groups and how this affects their decision making are given time, have clever camera set ups with interesting movements while “dramatic” scenes with Murphy’s estranged wife are treated like found footage movies with everything shot handheld as if there was no time left in the schedule for a full camera set up.
It’s a real shame as it handles its themes quite well and the acting from virtually everyone is great. Jackie Earl Haley in particular is superb as the slimy military man who hates RoboCop and Samuel L. Jackson looks to be having a lot of fun in his Bill O’Reilly parody. But sadly the movie fails at telling any form of story which you can invest in. In the end, RoboCop is just a series of unsubtle political messages that occasionally has scenes of a bloke in a robot suit shooting things.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published February 9, 2014. Updated November 9, 2019.
