RoboCop (review)

In this remake of Paul Verhoeven’s ultra-violent 1987 film, honest Detroit police officer Alex Murphy is once again mortally wounded by a criminal gang and subsequently resuscitated by a massive, cutthroat corporation in the form of a powerfully augmented cyborg. The central narrative stakes of both versions involve Murphy’s struggle to assert his personality over his programming, a conflict articulated in the villainous activities of his corporate creators and their attempts to treat him as a commodity rather than a human being. However, the cinematic template of this new version is no less the original RoboCop than it is the recent remake of Total Recall (Wiseman US/Canada 2012), another high-gloss Hollywood adaptation that took all the grit, repulsiveness and humour out of its Verhoeven-directed source material. In both cases, the brand-recognition and geek-reverence of a 1980s classic have been hijacked in order to provide sleek, hundred million dollar thrills. While 2014’s RoboCop lacks the visual dazzle of 2012’s Total Recall, it at least compensates by displaying considerable frustration at its own studio-dictated parameters, straining to be politically and thematically interesting even as it plods through a series of conventional action-thriller scenarios.

As is normal for this kind of branded reboot, it is less interesting to identify points of continuity than it is to explore what has been refashioned and updated. In 1987, the manufacture of a police officer who was half-man/half-machine was a brutal, profiteering response to strike action by police officers suffering the sharp end of Reaganite economics. RoboCop’s efficient, controllable and crucially wage-free version of law enforcement materialised not so much technological fears as social ones: the spectre of business logic displacing family and community, and even nullifying any kind of political resistance to this process. Walking a very fine line between satire, drama and action, the film is both unforgivably vicious and avowedly liberal in its agenda.

In 2014, corporate America may no longer be in bed with drug-peddling thugs, but it remains rotten to the core. Raymond Sellars’s (Michael Keaton) billion-dollar company OmniCorp has cornered the global market in military drones, but he remains hamstrung by a Senate bill preventing their use on US soil. Aiming to have the bill repealed, Sellars, in what is essentially a PR stunt, puts a man inside a machine and puts the machine onto the streets of Detroit. This man is Murphy (a bland but affecting Joel Kinnaman), whose investigation of gunrunner Antoine Vallen (Patrick Garrow) prompts the latter to blow him up with a car bomb. Here as elsewhere this new version takes a notably soft line, having Murphy survive his attack and giving his wife (Abbie Cornish) an expanded and entirely tokenistic role. There is even a scene in which she tearfully signs over to OmniCorp and the kindly Dr Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) the rights to her husband’s medical treatment, and perhaps also his soul. This is quite different from Verhoeven’s take, in which Murphy was killed outright and his body used as the raw material base of a commodity without any characters even remotely considering the ethics involved (Murphy’s wife, meanwhile, was only glimpsed in flashback). Similarly, the greed-is-good equivalence between commercial and criminal enterprises found in the earlier film (personified in the repeated mantra ‘good business is where you find it’) is here replaced by a terrifyingly effective military-industrial apparatus. It may be possible to draw connections between Vallen’s gunrunning and OmniCorp’s drone-deployment, but these affinities are far fainter than Verhoeven’s frank denunciation of corporate avarice. Privileging Murphy’s relationship with his wife and son also firmly entrenches the drama in the nuclear family, and further pulls this film out of the political realm occupied by the original.

Another crucial difference is speed. While the plotting here lacks the clean efficiency of its source, and features instead a tangle of stories that never...