Review of RoboCop (2014) by Patrick H — 04 May 2015

Starts well, ends badly.

The remake of Robocop had potential to be a good movie, and better than the original. From the set up there were opportunities for political commentary as well as a Blade Runner-like examination of what it means to be human. The updating of the plot made for an interesting background.

There was even an initial attempt at creating an engaging human drama, through involving the wife and son of the cop who becomes Robocop.

However, none of these opportunities are exploited and none of these potential strands go anywhere. From the point it just becomes like Judge Dredd and a fairly generic action movie. The human drama is very superficial.

Plot is so unoriginal, predictable and one-dimensional I ended up supporting the bad guys, almost out of spite.

None of this is helped by Joel Kinnaman's performance in the lead role. Very wooden. Ideal for a robot, you might think, but the idea was that Robocop would show warmth and emotion. Unfortunately, he's not good at that, coming across as very superficial.

Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman and Abbie Cornish deserve a lot better movie than this.