Don't Buy This For a Dollar

Joel Kinnaman is spam-in-the-can in Robocop.

«« RoboCop.  Written by Joshua Zetumer. Directed by José Padilha, based on the 1987 film. At area theaters.

         

Mitt Romney once declared that "Corporations are people, my friend." Deplorable as this legal fiction seems to many of us, our post-Citizen's United reality is worse: not only are corporations people, they're increasingly the only "people" who count. When it comes to electoral clout, political pull, legal muscle or any other measure of influence, the United States no longer comprises 320 million human beings. The real population is about 16,000—the number of businesses the Census Bureau defines as "large" because they have more than 500 employees.

          This was hardly news in 1987, when Paul Verhoeven's original Robocop wafted like a breath of fresh air into the summer silly season. The story of a slain cop (Peter Weller) reincarnated as a law-keeping cyborg not only delivered action, visual kicks, and terrific villains in Ronny Cox and Kurtwood Smith. It also served up a helping of smart, dead-accurate satire on corporate culture and the media. Subsequent boardroom malpractice and the dumbed-down content of our airwaves have shown the Edward Neumeier/Michael Miner script to be not only ridiculous, but prophetic. RoboCop's success at the box office ($110 million in 2014 dollars) also proved that popcorn movies don't have to be formulaic or pre-sold to find a big audience.

          In short, releasing a RoboCop remake without the wit makes about as much sense as remaking West Side Story without—you know—the sing-y parts. Yet this is what we've got in Brazilian director José Padilha's update. Apparently he didn't get the memo: the original was satire, not a superhero origin story.

          Virtually every choice the little-known Padilha (Elite Squad) makes represents a pulled punch. When hero cop Alex Murphy dies in the original, Verhoeven makes us expire with him, presenting his demise in the form of truly harrowing point-of-view shots; by contrast, Padilha and writer Joshua Zetumer have their Murphy die in a simple car-bombing, observed (not felt) as if through a security camera. Joel Kinnaman is a bland, Swedish meatball of an actor who feels like the second or third option after the director's first choice wasn't available. In place of Cox ("Who cares if it works?") and Smith ("Take a look at my face, Dick!"), the remake gives us Michael Keaton as one of those tech CEOs who, like Reed Hastings or Mark Zuckerberg, prefers casual-neat to suit-and-tie. Keaton may have started out as a stand-up comic, but there's nothing remotely witty—or scary—about his performance. And while Padilha had good sense in his casting of Abbie Cornish as Murphy's wife, Cornish goes wasted here, despite having one of the strongest onscreen presences in Hollywood.

          The best part of this RoboCop comes early, before RoboCop himself appears. In an ersatz "news" segment, the Pentagon's latest models of combat robots are presented winning hearts and minds in occupied Tehran. Things quickly go bad, but mouthy conservative pundit Samuel L. Jackson spins the mayhem as proving the drones are necessary. (Lack of mayhem would, of course, prove the same thing, that the drones are doing a heck of a job.)
          RoboCop's mediocrity is perhaps not all the filmmakers' fault. In 1987, the prospect of combat robots and cyborgs was far enough in the future to afford a certain freedom in satirizing them. Now that they're just over the horizon, there's an uncomfortable feeling that the joke may soon be on us.

© 2014 Nicholas Nicastro