The new Robocop is a kinder gentler Robocop. Oh, he’s still a bloodthirsty killing machine, but he doesn’t make near the mess that his 1987 counterpart made. The orginal Robocop was so hyperviolent and the characters so vile and evil it left me shaken for weeks. Well, maybe I was just much more of a wuss back in those days.
I liked the new Robocop, even if it makes Detroit look better in the future than it looks today. I liked the logo for Omnicorp, which looked a lot like the logo for the Umbrella Corporation and the Dharma Initiative. The best part of the film is Samuel Jackson going all Fox News on your ass.
The story is pretty much the same, a good cop is injured and turned into a law enforcing cyborg. He’s just a head and a set of lungs, but once he has his robot body in place, he can do just about anything. He’s a good shot and he actually wants to enforce the law. But he has that whole pesky human side that keeps him from just murdering people in cold blood. So they widdle that down and he shots bad guys just like the robot police force.
It lacked that iconic ending where the evil Corporate Boss fires the man that Robocop needs to kill and it was watered down in several other spots as well. He wasn’t captured and tortured to death on his first day on the job, for instance. They also managed to work in endless wars in the Middle East and show that we would be stomping around Iran with our big metal feet. Well, anything is possible.
Overall it was a fun film, but it was hard for me not to suffer a bit of cognitive dissonance as I compared it to the orginal.
The old Robocop made Detroit look a lot better than it does today, also. Easy, both times, as both movies weren’t filmed in Detroit. It’s hard to find anything as bad as Detroit, or even worse, unless someone goes up I-75 a little ways to Flint.
So, maybe killer robots aren’t such a bad idea?