Gotta feel a little sorry for director José Padilha, tasked with taking over an action-classic remake that had been stuck in development for years — and that fans of the much-admired original eyed with considerable skepticism.
But let’s also be honest for a moment about the movie Padilha is revisiting: Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 RoboCop, a B movie punching far above its weight, with some cheekily subversive Establishment-tweaking and brilliantly executed subtext buried under some truly clunky performances and stock ’80s action. In short: There was plenty of room for improvement. And in taking advantage of that, Padilha’s new take on the material isn’t the disaster some might have predicted.
It doesn’t hurt that Padilha and screenwriter Joshua Zetumer have even more fertile political material to work with in 2014. Verhoeven’s film had no shortage of targets — among them rampant crime, corruption, the vapidity of media and entertainment, and corporate greed. The update manages to work with all of those while also taking high-caliber shots at drone warfare, flag-waving cable-news talking heads and the vulnerability of legislators to money and marketing.
The basic story is the same: Detroit cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), recently all but killed in the line of duty, is rebuilt as a cyborg crime fighter by a huge corporation looking to mine the city’s out-of-control crime troubles for profit. As before, nearly everyone involved is crooked in one way or another, and it’s up to our metallic hero to find the humanity still tangled up amid the circuitry that’s so thoroughly clouding his brain functions, so he can clean up more than just the city’s streets.