ROBOCOP (2014) ★ ★ ★

The thing that made the original 1987 "Robocop" special was its unpredictability. MGM's 2014 reboot lacks that trait, and reveals that its makers didn't understand the original as well as they should have. But the remake manages to finesse some special moments of its own into its otherwise lackluster narrative, which saves it from being the bomb it was precariously close to becoming. 

Part of the genius of Paul Verhoeven's film was its casting; Peter Weller is an offbeat personality with strange features and a deep, leaden delivery, and he was born to play programmable fuzz. Verhoeven wisely allowed elements of dark comedy and schlock horror into his script, and included gory and ironic scenes of a radically disfigured criminal being bashed apart by a moving vehicle and a malevolent robot murdering an unsuspecting suit in a boardroom demonstration gone awry. Weller's character is himself murdered by scuzzy crooks, but what remains of him is revived in a new form: He is made into a cyborg, roughly 25% human, and the rest pure machine. We see through his eyes a terrifying world projected onto a cathode-ray screen, and from this bizarre perspective we experience a terrifying new reality for an involuntarily resurrected cop. He's no longer human, and worse, he's no longer constrained by things like a finite lifespan and the need for sleep. It dawns on us, just as it dawns on him, that his new reality is awful and irreversible, and it makes us really hate the villains that put him there. 

José Padilha's film gets the basic tone right, but misses on the casting. Joel Kinnaman's face is far too vanilla to be a Robocop, a fact that becomes glaringly obvious when his face is all that's left of him. Watching him in this movie generated a lot of cognitive dissonance, and I found myself thinking that he looked like a Ralph Lauren model who had accidentally stumbled onto one of Thierry Mugler's catwalks. This effect was further accentuated by the odd choice of changing the "tin-man" suit from silver to piano black, which unfortunately made him look less like a robot, and more like a guy wearing fashionable SWAT gear. It has occurred to every sentient eighties "Robocop" fan that the first film appealed to discerning audiences by making a comedically ridiculous premise believable. The suit, the metal visor, and the glistening silver plates all said "robot" without saying "cartoon." Weller took care of the rest. 

Another issue is the politics of this "Robocop." Padilha thrusts us into a future where Samuel L. Jackson has a news editorial show that fawns over America's implementation of robotically-enforced martial law in foreign conflict zones. We're given a glimpse from his studio into Tehran, where people are terrorized on a daily basis by hulking machines that poke them with guns and digitally access their personal records. Jackson's character exhibits considerable Bush-era zeal for this sort of incursion, and we're meant to think that America is like that. This is further compounded by the domestic storyline, which pits Alex Murphy against crime lord Antoine Vallon, but then, in a remarkable bait and switch, obfuscates this revenge-fueled rivalry by letting Murphy casually dispatch Vallon and refocus his lasers on Michael Keaton's character. Keaton is Raymond Sellers, the CEO of OmniCorp, which is behind Murphy's transformation. Sellers uses Murphy's effectiveness as a crime fighter to sway congress into repealing the Dreyfus Act, which bans the use of law enforcement drones and drone technology in the United States. This isn't a world where Robocop is hellbent on getting even with the dirtbags who put him in an iron suit. In Padilho's Detroit, Robocop feels used, and resents it. But that's all he feels. They took the "Robo" part literally here.

I think the movie's best performance rests with Gary Oldman. This isn't a surprise, but I appreciated how Oldman's Dr. Dennett Norton struck just the right balance of shrewd entrepreneurialism and heroic defiance. His character spends most of his screen-time as a scientist who lets the bossman Sellers pressure him into creating, tweaking, and maintaining a perfect killing machine, yet he redeems himself convincingly in the end. There's a scene where he uploads an entire police database into Murphy's digitized brain, which erupts his dopamine levels and sends him into a seizure. Norton has mere minutes to present his creation to the mayor and the press, and in desperation he shouts at his government overlords, "What do you want me to do?" "Fix him," is the response. "Do what you have to do. Your reputation is on the line every bit as much as ours." In a movie where things get hazy and a little silly, Oldman is a grounding force. Sellers' requests are ruthless and evil, but the man who answers them is frustrated and ashamed of himself.

The rest of the cast is serviceable. Abbie Cornish meets the requisite demands of being beautiful and believable as Murphy's aggrieved wife, and John Paul Ruttan is okay as his son. I found unintended humor in Ruttan's robotic performance, but his part is so small that my fun was limited. Despite the many things that made it interesting, "Robocop" 2014 falls short by missing on details. This Robocop doesn't look the part. He doesn't sound the part. He doesn't really act the part, either. Weller's Robocop is frightening in its tunnel-vision approach to justice, while Kinnaman's is soft-spoken and tethered by OmniCorp's control freaks. I kept waiting for the moment when things would turn the darker corner and get just as weird as they did in Verhoeven's flick, but Padilha's style and Joshua Zetumer's screenplay never melded the way man and machine need to for this sort of thing. 

                                                                                                                                                    --- Bill Fontaine