How do you
make a good action movie? Well for the last thirty years you call guys like
Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Willis, or any of the other guys who currently star
in every Expendables movie. Nowadays it’s a little tricky, because without that
star, or even someone you can root for, action movies have to rely solely on
well, the action. Those movies do have a few things working for them though,
but the biggest tool by far is CGI, all you have to do is dream it up and its skies
the limit. However, big explosions, gun fights, and go old hand-to-hand
fighting is great and all, but without character and story it’s all for
nothing. Enter our current movie to try and give us our action fix, a film
about a man in a suit of armor, and his name is not Iron Man.
Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), is a detective in the
Detroit Police Department. Murphy was a
little too good at his job, together with his partner Jack (Michael K.
Williams) they almost bring down a crime lord. Alex gets targeted and just
about dies when his car blows up with him right by it. Lucky for him, Alex
becomes the prototype for a future kind of cop, all machine, but with the
emotions and judgment of a man. A Robocop. Dr. Norton (Gary Oldman) is the man
who put Humpty Dumpty back together, and Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) is
the man paying for it all. Everything is going as planned until Murphy starts
to solve his own murder, and that is when the house that built Robocop starts
to fall.
When a movie
like this comes out it is hard to judge it on its own merits, when you have
something so original to compare it to. Director Jose Padilha had an uphill
battle the whole time; he had to remake a film many people loved. Padilha can’t
give you the same film, because “Robocop” of 1987 was such a product if it’s
time. “Robocop” of 2014 is rooted in technology that is out there already, and in
a world with lot bleaker outlook. When the trailer first came out I wanted to
scream “What have you done to Robocop?” I was prepared to turn my nose up to
this film, but I did my best not to do that; instead I enjoyed parts of it and
saw what Padilha was trying to do. He didn't remake Robocop, MGM and Columbia
were going to do it no matter what, he made “his” Robocop, and for that alone I
can appreciate what he was attempting. Once I got past the appreciation of
that, I was still left with a movie that I was pretty indifferent about. On one
hand I loved seeing Michael Keaton being Michael Keaton, even an evil one, but
then I didn’t enjoy that it took almost an hour to get to the title character. And
the action was good, what little of it there was, and that made it hard to
stand out. “Robocop” is just an average movie with an iconic name, and when it
comes to good action movies, I wouldn’t buy this one for a dollar.
No comments:
Post a Comment