BlairCo wrote:Oldman will continue his string of phoned-in performances

SilverHeart wrote:First review in, and it's long as shit.

Tonight I attended the first ever screening of RoboCop (2014). I went to get a coke and never signed an NDA or anything. I figure if you like Star Wars, you probably have at least a little interest in RoboCop (maybe). Both have cyborgs and robots, so that’s how I’ll justify reviewing this on a Star Wars blog. I apologize for any typos. I’m just trying to get this out before I go to bed tonight.

RoboCop (2014) is a surprisingly good and fun film. However, it lacks the punk rock edge and biting satire of the 1987 film from which it is based upon. But to its credit, it attempts to grapple with the ideas and concepts futurists like Ray Kurzweil have told us to get ready for. In some ways, RoboCop (2014) makes our future seem further away than it really is, but at least it tries to deal with the struggles we face with machines, surveillance, and the information age.

The movie is not a lazy half hearted attempt at making a RoboCop film. Director José Padilha and the team of writers tried and it paid off. The movie is not going to replace that nostalgic feeling you have for the first film. So don’t even ask it to do that. This iteration is similar but does its own thing and does it well. The movie is a satisfying take on RoboCop. Even if it lacks the utter insanity of the original and instead appeals to the human heart.

The film ultimately wins for not trying to be the original. The biting satire of the original just seems like it would fall flat without the right writers. This movie instead decides to delve into the meaning of humanity, family, and privacy in the information age. Using RoboCop to have this conversation was appropriate and to be honest, I’m glad they did it this way because we have something new instead of something just retold. The movie never really makes us relive any classic moments, instead doing what it must do to serve the story it tries to tell.

This movie is not going to hurt your childhood. RoboCop 3 already did that. This movie is better than RoboCop 2 by leaps and bounds (unless you want 80′s cheese in which nothing made today is going to really beat that anyways). A part of me wants to say this is what Batman Begins is to Batman (1989). But I’m afraid that might be too extreme, but that’s the best I can do at midnight on a Tuesday night.

Spoilers below:

The film opens with Samuel L. Jackson who plays Pat Novak, who hosts The Novak Element. He’s one part Bill O’Reilly of The O’Reilly Factor and one part Southern Baptist, verbally espousing the gospel of the corporation whose pocket he is in. We start with Novak’s show putting reporters from Detroit on the ground in Tehran. Instead of U.S. military patrols and dinky drones in the air, we have robots and unmanned stealth fighters oppressing the city with robots on every corner. The robots are commanded by Jackie Earle Haley as Maddox, an OmniCorp mercenary (a subsidiary of OCP in the film).

As the news team films a fluff P.R. piece for The Novak Element we cut to a group of suicide bombers. The bombers comment to one another that their sacrifice must be caught on camera to have a real impact. The bombers run in front of the news team and are gunned down by the robots and ED-209 walkers (who also have OCP written on them). But a twelve year old son of one of the attackers picks up a knife and storms out of the house against his mother’s will to follow his father and uncle’s charge on the machines. He holds a puny blade and points it at the ED-209 walker and is machined gunned to pieces. We think it happened on television, but then Novak tells the reporter not to worry, the feed to the capital was cut and no one saw it. He then looks at the camera and says it might have been American soldiers killed had it not been for the robots on the ground over there.

This whole sequence really felt and looked like a big budget version of Battlestar Galactica. The robots reminded me of Cylons. They actually looked pretty good and were visually interesting. The action was good too, but it was not gratuitous. It wasn’t RoboCop in the 1980′s bloody or anything. It felt pretty tame for the subject matter, actually. That is actually kind of a weakness of the film in certain regards, but the movie doesn’t need gratuitous violence to tell the story it tells.

This is when we actually learn why the P.R. stunt was going down in the first place. 70% of Americans oppose robots being placed on the streets of The United States. A democrat, Senator Dreyfuss, opposes robots handling weapons against American citizens because he feels heartless machines do not understand what it means to take a life. Of course as we hear his side of the story, he is belittled by Pat Novak’s interjecting commentary. The report ends with Novak questioning if Senator Dreyfuss is “for crime in America.”

That is when the real villain, Michael Keaton as Raymond Sellars enters the picture. Sellars stands to make a lot of money should robots be placed on American soil. So he starts looking for candidates to use a man in a robot’s skin to garner support. Gary Oldman plays Dr. Dennett Norton. Norton who has been tasked with finding the right candidate, because the marketing team consistently fails at finding the right person for the project (a legless man fails to meet a safe psychological profile for instance).

Dr. Dennett Norton is a man trying to use technology to better humanity. In his opening sequence, he has a husband and wife in his lab. The man has lost both of his hands and has had cybernetic hands attached to his body. He is asked to pick up his guitar and play. He starts to play a classical piece with his cybernetic fingers, but as he becomes emotional, the system’s program breaks down and his hands become confused. Norton tells the man he must not get too emotional or he’ll confuse his program, but the defeated man expresses to him that he has to become emotional to play his music. In this instance the human spirit is still crushed by technology, but we see what Norton wants to do with his genius and that emotion trumps any programming we have. The meeting is interrupted by Sellars who wants to speak to Norton about the RoboCop project.

Norton fights Sellars on the concept. Norton has told Sellars he will not let his work be used for military application. He is pretty much forced onto the project but goes willingly because he is saving a man’s life and that man will be allowed to retain his consciousness. Sellars is circumventing U.S. law and the Dreyfuss Act by putting a man inside the robot.

We meet Alex Murphy, played by Joel Kinnaman. Murphy is an undercover cop attempting to buy illegal weapons from a street gang. The deal goes sour and a gun fight breaks out. His partner Lewis, played by Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire) is shot and the dealers get away. As Murphy debriefs with the chief, we get some insight that she might be corrupt and the police were in fact the ones supplying the weapons to the dealers, but Murphy hasn’t figured all that out yet. Murphy leaves the police department to visit his partner in the hospital, while there someone plants something on his vehicle.

Murphy returns home that night to his family. It seems as if things were a little strained at home, with Murphy being undercover a lot, it is clear his absence is noticed by the family. Murphy doesn’t get home as it is his son’s bed time, as soon as his son says hello, it is time for bed.

After they put their son to bed, his wife comments that now his partner has been hurt, they can both get out off of undercover work. She says people will stop trying to buy weed from Murphy when he takes her out to dinner. Murphy and Clara begin some heavy petting. Once they start kissing, those moments were extremely awkward in the performance, and while Abbie Cornish was pretty good as Mrs. Murphy, the chemistry between the two was very clumsy. Thankfully, we never get to see them take it much further. Also, this is the last time Murphy is a man, so the strained chemistry between the actors is actually mostly a positive thing for the rest of the film.

As the car alarm goes off, Murphy stops putting the moves on his wife because their son will wake up if doesn’t shut it off. His alarm clicker doesn’t work and when he gets to the car, it explodes. In the cut I saw, Murphy stumbles to the porch and lays down. I don’t believe the effects where completed on the sequence because he’s in much worse shape in the following sequences.

We then see that Murphy has been burned really badly in the explosion (think Anakin Skywalker in Revenge of the Sith). Strangely, his face is burned, but when he’s RoboCop his face is just fine with no explanation. We see that his arms have been blown off. You may have noticed Murphy has one black hand and one human hand in the trailer. As we see him being put together, we get the sense his human hand isn’t really all that human, it was just to make him appear human to the public thanks to OmniCorp/OCP’s marketing team. His human hand is literally a robotic tube going into what is left of his hand.

The following sequence was really rad and disturbing. It tells us three months have passed. It seems as if all is well. Murphy’s at a barbeque dancing with his wife to Frank Sinatra. His partner is there, times are good. Then we see RoboCop’s face in a lab, he’s smiling. That’s when Norton and his team stop downloading memories to his brain and his brain stops reconstructing memories. Murphy was simply in a dream state that begins to crumble around him. We learn his brain is a reconstructed brain (much of it isn’t even his brain in parts). His reality fades away before his eyes and the backyard barbeque becomes Norton’s lab.

Murphy begins to panic. He can’t move. Norton tells him to relax but he’s tripping out. The performance by Kinnaman really sells this sequence. It was too much for him to handle mentally and his anxiety levels rise. Norton switches on his spine. Murphy takes his first steps but he is angry and confused by what has happened to him and he doesn’t understand where he is, first thinking he’s having a nightmare. He runs out of the lab. The room he runs into is some kind of technological factory full of Chinese assembly line workers. Murphy/RoboCop runs out of there and into some fields where Chinese farmers look on at him in confusion. All the while, Norton is begging him to turn around and come back. Once they know he will not, they flip a switch and Murphy collapses in the watery fields and Chinese farmers gather around him.

RoboCop is then switched back on. He demands to be taken out of the suit. Norton explains it is not a suit, it is him. Norton then hits a few buttons and Murphy’s legs disengage and disappear into the floor. His arm comes off next and his “human” arm follows. He keeps coming apart until we see he is just a head, brain steam, heart, and lungs (somewhat like General Grievous in Revenge of the Sith but more disturbing). That’s when Murphy demands to be put back together and he says he doesn’t want to be a machine. But Norton says he is not a machine, he is a man still with freewill. Murphy than says he wishes to die and to be killed if that is the case. But Norton says he can’t do that and he wouldn’t know what to tell his wife and son if he let that happen. Murphy, defeated, says to tell them he just died but Norton refuses.

We then see the awkward video phone call home. I thought it was kind of funny when Murphy’s video call is placed, the sound effect was a 56k modem screech which I hope is temporary. But before he makes the call, Murphy sets up the camera and tries to put himself into the frame. He hates his robotic body and keeps zooming in until all we see is his flesh face. The call between Murphy and Clara is difficult for the couple and ends with Murphy refusing to speak to his son.

Soon after that call Norton runs more tests and the next day Murphy returns home for the first time. His son has made a huge banner saying “welcome home dad” and has drawn a Red Wings logo on it and other things his father likes. I should take this moment to say that when RoboCop walks, the sound effect was awesome and you could really feel the weight of the suite and it gave it some “gravity” so to speak. The weirdness of the new body is felt strongly when he returns home and steps on his home’s hardwood floor. His wife hugs him and she is estranged by the metal body he now possesses. He kneels before his son and his son tells him he has recorded every Red Wings game for him. Murphy asks his son how they did the last four months and his son says he hasn’t watched any of the games, he was waiting for him that whole time. Murphy tells his boy he cannot watch them tonight, he has to return to his lab. Murphy leaves the house realizing home isn’t home anymore, he belongs in a recharging station where he has his blood and fluids refilled. He is not going to return to his wife’s bed every again. Murphy returns to the lab and shuts down.

We then cut to the next day and Sellars is demanding RoboCop be prepped for a press conference. Sellars started this project to convince the American people robots are a good idea and he has plans to slowly shut off the human in RoboCop anyways. Norton is downloading a criminal database into RoboCop’s brain, full of documents and videos of wanted fugitives. Things start off okay but Murphy begins to have a seizure and falls to the ground before all of it can be put in his mind. The corporate marketing team demands he get up and get to the conference and tell Norton his reputation is the online.

I found it kind of weird that Murphy, or a man for that matters, would not have huge problems with that data. Surely, having the intense data of every crime in your city would turn you into some kind of cynical person. I sort of thought they were going to go there but they never did.

Frustrated, Norton yells at the marking team “what do you want me to do?” while a convulsing RoboCop falls to the ground unable to handle the information. Norton then orders his assistant to drain all the dopamine from Murphy’s brain and he levels off. But now Murphy is not the life-like man we knew, but the zombie cop we first met in the 1987 film. He walks to the press conference elevator where his wife, son, and partner cheer him on but he walks right past them without a care in the world for them. He then takes in elevator down to the press conference.

While on the stage with the mayor and Sellars, RoboCop begins to scan the crowd. He then identifies a rapist/arsonist. In the midst of the P.R. show, RoboCop jumps into the crowd and incapacitates the criminal. The frightened crowd then erupts in applause. The scene immediately cuts back to Samuel L. Jackson’s Pat Novak who shows his audience how efficient robots are. He walks around his holographic report and shows his audience how two cops where in the crowd, next to the rapist/arsonist and they had no idea he was there, and that’s why robots are superior. Sellars considers the day a big win for his agenda. That’s when we get a short montage of RoboCop arresting drug dealers and people in his wanted database. The OCP marketing guy comments they won’t have enough room in the jails if RoboCop arrests them all. As RoboCop drives by, the people of Detroit cheer.

We then see some training exercises with Maddox and RoboCop. Maddox likes to remind RoboCop he isn’t Murphy, he’s just a machine who thinks he’s Murphy. He refuses to shake Murphy’s hand and calls him a Tin Man. When their first virtual training exercise starts, he blasts “If I only had a brain” into the sound system. The first time they put Murphy up against a robot and he’s 5 seconds slower than the simulated robot A.I., Maddox calls him a failure and suggest terminating the project. That’s when Maddox utters that the robots are superior and he’d “buy that for a dollar,” making the audience cheer loudly at my screening. It actually wasn’t forced and was delivered effortlessly.

On the second training day, Murphy outsmarts tons of robots and ED -209s in an abandoned factory. However, Maddox is trying to shoot Murphy in the face to kill him this time, because he’s a jerk. So after all the robots are defeated, Murphy shoots the gun out of Maddox’s hands and asks the scientist over the radio connection “what happens to an ******* in a flesh suit when it is electrocuted” and he tases him into unconsciousness. The audience cheered at this. I found the yodeling rock music in this sequence to be sort of questionable. The mix was still pretty bad, so it might play better in the final version.

RoboCop goes off to fight another day of crime fighting when he is ambushed by his wife Clara who tells him he has to come home. But RoboCop doesn’t want to return home, he’s fighting crime and not feeling emotions. She tells him that their son won’t go to school and he is just shutting down. RoboCop then gets on his motorcycle and zooms away. Norton’s team then says RoboCop isn’t using all his processing power on the crime database anymore. He is in fact tapping into the school’s surveillance system and watching his son being mobbed by press and generally having a hard time.

Murphy returns to the driveway of his wife and son’s home. He sees all kinds of bomb residue from the explosion that disfigured him. He then witnesses via surveillance footage that his son saw him being blown up. He realizes his family does need him. That’s when he overrides his programming and decides to take down his killers and the people who hurt his partner and ruined his family.

He taps into the Detroit’s surveillance system and finds one of the gang’s members on the street. RoboCop throws him to the ground and steps on his hand, breaking all the bones and tells him he has two choices. The first is he can remain silent and he is going to tase him so badly he might suffer organ failure and empty his bowels while being arrested or he can get arrested and tell him where the hideout is. We then cut to RoboCop riding off to the hide out.

For some reason the gang there figures out he’s coming and they turn off the lights. The whole things goes night vision at this point. It was pretty lame with some cool visuals, but mostly eye roll inducing. I was pretty bored during this sequence but the audience ate it up at the showing I was at, so it shows what I know. RoboCop takes most of the gang down and then finds evidence on the weapons stored there that the Detroit P.D. were in fact giving the guns to the gang members and he has the evidence to make some arrests of corrupt cops.

RoboCop burst into the police department. His partner backs him up, happy the old Murphy is back. Murphy identifies those whose prints were on the guns and tells the corrupt cops they are under arrest. A short skirmish breaks out and the corrupt cops are incapacitated by RoboCop and his partner.

That’s when Murphy goes for the chief of police. As he’s demanding she admit she is guilty (by gun point which would not hold up in a court of law RoboCop!). Sellars gets word that RoboCop has bypassed his programming. Sellars has the chief of police on his payroll, so he has his people shut RoboCop down and he collapses before making the arrest.

Sellars tells Norton the project is being terminated. Their goals have been met. He wants RoboCop destroyed. At first Sellars fights him but then agrees to shut him down in exchange for funding for ten years of projects he wants with his own team. Sellars agrees, but it is a ruse.

Norton then calls his assistant and she locks down the lab. OCP guys are trying to get into the lab but Norton sneaks in with a diversion while dodging a few bullets. He removes RoboCop’s overriding system chip from his brain and gives him free will. As he removes the chip, the soldiers burst into the lab. Norton is shouting for Murphy to wake up and he does, just in time to take the soldiers down.

Murphy then reflects upon what had happened and somehow figures out that Sellars was controlling the cops and is a prime suspect in his death. This part confused me. I get that he understands the corruption can be traced back to him, but why he sees it that way was confusing to me. I must have missed something here. Murphy then zooms off on his RoboCop cycle to get Sellars.

It then cuts to Novak asking his audience how many times Murphy has to die for his country before we just let robots on American soil. The vote has shifted and Americans now support robots on U.S. soil. The amendment passes and OCP can now sell robots to police forces.

Thinking RoboCop is now dead, Sellars decides to put on a news piece for Novak’s show, in which he says what a hero Murphy was (because the only thing better than a hero is a dead hero). But Clara, Murphy’s wife has gone on the news herself to say that OmniCorp has not let her see her husband in two weeks and something is off.

Fearing a P.R. nightmare they bring Clara and her son to the OmniCorp building where they tell her Murphy is dead and try to buy her off but she refuses them. She attempts to leave but the building is put on lockdown because RoboCop is fighting robots all over the place trying to get to Sellars.

RoboCop is punching ED-209′s in the face, blowing them up. He’s fighting robots. But he begins to get out numbered and overwhelmed. That’s when Murphy’s partner shows up with other cops and they ram an armored vehicle into the building, crashing into an ED-209. It turns out the robots can’t shoot they are not pointing a gun at the robots or anyone else. RoboCop is getting shot to hell and his armor/robot body is all jacked up with pieces falling off. The cops make a human shield which allows RoboCop to escape the bullets he’s been taking for a few minutes now. But Murphy runs into Maddox who is killed by Lewis, Murphy’s partner, allowing Murphy to continue on his path to arrest or kill Sellars.

RoboCop then gets to the top of the building where his wife and son are there with Sellars and the P.R. people awaiting a helicopter, which flies away when RoboCop points a gun at it.

Murphy is going to detain Sellars when Sellars tells RoboCop to try and cuff him, presenting his wrist to RoboCop. Sellars then hits a button and RoboCop can’t raise his stun gun against Sellars.

Sellars starts to threaten RoboCop saying if he wanted him dead, he would be dead already. Sellars then points the gun at Murphy’s family and that’s when Murphy overrides his programming one last time in a Hulkamaniac fashion and incapacitates Sellars before falling to the ground himself. The camera then floats away into the air and the scene down below gets smaller and smaller.

We then cut to the Novak show where Novak explains that the President of the United States vetoed the bill and robots cannot patrol U.S. soil. Novak then spins it into a story where liberals have corrupted the president and they hate freedom, America, and security (essentially). We then see media spy footage in which RoboCop has been repaired by Norton and he stands to fight another day.

The final act of the film is not as good as the first act and middle of the film. It clearly works to gives us a sequel. The movie had a lot of good laughs and the action was pretty good too. It was in no way like the Total Recall remake. This film tried and mostly succeeded. It was not the best RoboCop that could have been made but it was a pretty stellar attempt at it. I have seen every RoboCop movie ever in the theater and this one stands next to the original pretty well. It was a deeper more involved story than the original, but did not critique Americans as socially well as it could have. It sort of made me wish Rockstar, the people who make Grand Theft Auto would handled the video game so we could have this universe with that hilarious look at stupidity the movie could have given us.

I enjoyed it and my sense was that the theater I saw it with did too.

m4st4 wrote:Does anyone find Abbie Cornish a bit... corny?