Robophobic...

Evan Mckay

My girlfriend Crystal and I have developed a tradition of celebrating Valentine's day not only the week after, because all the restaurants are packed and awful, but we always manage to see an action movie. Last year was terrible. "A Good Day to Die Hard" was awful. This year was only marginally better. Robocop. I just wanted it to be a gritty Sci-Fi cop story. Instead it got dragged through the mud of trying to play on people's paranoia of drones. 

This movie starts off pretty good. The cast is wonderful! Michael Keaton?!?!? He was great. I had not seen that guy since black ops 2.Joel Kinnaman looked great as Robocop and even his partner,played by Michael K. Williams (Chalkie White from Boardwalk Empire) was pretty cool. Let us not forget about Gary Oldman. Always a great addition to any cast.

The exposition is pretty standard. Alex Murphy (the soon to be Robocop) is investigating a case, complete with the movie standards of corruption, gun trafficking, and there's an explosion where he is paralyzed and loses some limbs. Meanwhile, Raymond Sellers (Keaton) is the CEO of Omnicorp, a robotics/weapons facility wants to sell his robo-drones to police departments but cannot do to a piece of legislation that prohibits the use of drones on American soil. He decides he needs a man in a machine to sway public opinion. Eureka! Sadly, this is where the movie starts to drag.

Robo-drones, keeping grannies safe while grocery shopping.

The next half hour is Robocop not being good enough in combat simulations. The combat director of the company, Rorschach from Watchmen,  will not send him home because he does not perform as well as the drones do. So Dr. Dennet( Oldman) hacks Robocop's brain against albeit with some ethical qualms. So the story is mired in Robocop being hacked to be more robot than human. I really do not understand this part of the story. In the original Robocop comes out being a bad ass. In the movie it takes all the way till the last half hour for any badassery at all. I thought it was a strange narrative choice, that really just makes the movie far too long and chokes the arc with its grubby shitty modern Hollywood hands.

I do not want to spoil anything because there are some genuine cool moments in this movie, but they are far and few between. The story you care about gets resolved in a fairly anticlimactic way. 

Samuel L. Jackson, Fox news correspondent.

Who the script forces to be the "antagonists" are characters that are not really evil but suddenly flip the bad guy switch almost as fast and as incredulously asAnakin in episode one. To waste more of your time, there are a lot of scenes with the superfluous Pat Novak (Samuel L. Jackson) who is a satire of a Fox News pundit who just yells a lot.

All in all, I would say wait till this bad boy comes out on Amazon or whatever on demand rental service you choose. It just was not worth the $13 I paid to see it in IMAX. It also would not be worth the $10.75 too see it in a traditional theater. At least its better then "A Good Day to Die Hard".

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