Robocop (2014) review

I think there is no denying about how great the 80s where, and what a wonderous and amazing time the Geeks of my generation grew up in.

I mean, look back and then look at the current day.  Everything gets rebooted.  They are even making a Banana Man movie!

Robocop is a reboot of the classic Paul Verhoeven film, which uttered critique back then on the influence of corporations on the government.  The reboot deals with a more current day issue, the uprise of more and more robots taking over positions of man.

But those machines can`t "feel" like a human, and as such might take actions completely inappropriate, purely based on logic commands.  In the opening sequence, this is demonstrated as a young kid is blown to smithereens by a military use ED-209 for carrying a kitchen knife and not understanding the english the machine commands it in to drop his weapon.

But a faction of the politicians want more machines to save the lifes of personel, and to be more cost efficient, so when agent Murphy gets blown up by a car bomb for his role in preventing a gun transfer, they create a hybrid machine, RoboCop.

Though `hybrid` might be stretching it, this is basically only the brain, face and lungs that remain, where in the original there was half a man left...

Another difference is that Murphy now initially has all his feelings and memories, until blanked out when his public debut might be jeopardised by it.  The story mostly revolves about how his wife and son try to have the memories return, which of course works and he takes his revenge on the CEO who did it all to him...

Now, as far as reboots go, this one, for me, was one of the better and more enjoyable ones of late.  It stays parallel with the source material (okay, so there are variations, but that is normal, we`re 30 years further...).  But perhaps the biggest drawback of the movie is that it lasts about 1hr45, but nearly the entire first hour is taken up by chatter of who he was, how he becomes and why, before RoboCop really goes out hunting crime...

But at least, he has is iconic silver look most of the time ;-)