The 1987 “RoboCop” was a good movie, if you like bad movies. And who doesn’t? The remake is something quite different: thoughtful, grounded, more interested in questions of free will and emotions versus technology than it is in goofy satire. You know you’re not in Paul Verhoeven-land anymore when our introduction to bionic fingers is watching them master classical guitar instead of lifting a guy by his Adam’s apple.
Smartly and briskly directed by Brazil’s José Padilha, the reboot stars Sweden’s Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a cop in a Detroit of the near future who nearly loses his partner (Michael K. Williams) in a shootout he believes can be traced to dirty cops in his department.
Asking too many questions gets Alex blown up by a car bomb in front of his wife (Abbie Cornish). And when he wakes up in a Chinese lab, Alex Murphy isn’t half the man he used to be, or even one-quarter. All that’s left of him is a face, part of a brain, lungs and one hand. The rest is now a cold steel law enforcement machine that the wily CEO of OmniCorp (Michael Keaton) hopes can help him crack the American market for robot-led security.
Despite the rabble-rousing of a law-and-order TV personality (Samuel L. Jackson, the only actor on hand who didn’t get the memo not to be campy), the American people aren’t backing robot police, which are being used everywhere else on Earth along with drones in lieu of occupying troops in overseas hot spots. Says Sellars (Keaton): If people demand human judgment behind every bad guy that gets blown away on domestic soil, the surviving brain of Alex combined with a robot body is the perfect compromise — or scam.
What Alex doesn’t know is that he is merely a “passenger” in his own body: He enjoys the illusion of free will but all combat decisions are being handled by software. Still, the lead scientist on the project (Gary Oldman) marvels that Alex’s personality is asserting itself and busting through some of the protocols, creating an entity that can’t quite be controlled by remote, although it can simply be switched off.
The earlier film was painted in the broadest strokes, with a ludicrously wicked corporation and a no-nonsense shoot-’em-all hero, but Padilha works more subtly: This is a superhero film for grown-ups that reflects a moment when drone usage is hotly debated and it’s no longer ridiculous to contemplate a man who might have several metal limbs.
The director isn’t a master of action scenes, though these are competently executed, particularly a mass shootout in a darkened space. Where Padilha really succeeds, though, is in his warmth, his wondering about the human element amid technological frenzy.
Far from being a rock-’em-sock-’em B-movie, this “RoboCop” wants to know what it’s like to be a person without a body, how that person might appear to his own son (pretty much like the same old dad in a cool new outfit: kids adapt) and how he might rebuild a life with his wife. The movie doesn’t have the soul of “Batman Begins” and its sequels but it’s miles better than “Transformers” or “Iron Man 3,” which was pure pandering fantasy meant to make adolescent boys feel rocket-fueled and quip-empowered but never tied down to any icky feelings or interior conflicts.
Even the wicked OmniCorp is (for most of the film) more nuanced this time around: Keaton’s character quotes Steve Jobs a couple of times, and though profit and arrogance drive him, he isn’t wrong to note that machines tend to be more reliable than people or that Americans would rather lose robots than troops overseas. Security issues don’t always fit perfectly onto a left-right template, and neither does this “RoboCop,” (though the original was cheeky in its leftism).
“RoboCop” is topically up-to-the-moment but stylistically it’s retro. Far from using the story as an excuse to string together cheap thrills and blowout spectacle, its hero has all the heart of the Tin Man. As the guitar player learning to work his new steel fingers puts it when he says there is more to his art than mere mechanics, “I need emotion to play.”