ROBOCOCK / TEH REBOOTS
^ What you don't like about this picture is the same thing you won't like about this film.
I saw it. It was raining, I was bored, and Chinese movies are cheap. £4.50 for a 3D showing with free large popcorn and coke, that's like, a £12 discount versus the UK.
For the first 40 minutes I shamefully admit to being pleasantly surprised. The opening middle eastern warzone sequence was well done, the moral upshot of machines not being able to feel set with a fine point.
The director actually did some things quite well. He took his time with shots instead of shred cutting, and certain elements of Murphy's transformation came with a reasonable weight. He also used the original Robocop theme and had several throwbacks to the source, including a capitalist (semi) dystopia parodied through Samuel L. Jackson's Fox Newesque propaganda talk show.
Problem is, it all starts to unravel slowly but surely around half way.
I liked that the main actor wasn't an A-lister, but he was also a bit average in performance terms. His partner, Lewis, now transformed from cute pudgy white chick to black undercover cop, was atrocious - although in terms of badness it was hard to differentiate between him and Murphy's wife, who may or may not have spent an entire day in a school for performing arts.
Gary Oldman and Michael Keaton were superb choices: the two of whom did a great good job of expanding the Omnicorp role in a positive and interesting way. Unfortunately most of every supporting character is paper thin. The crooked cops and the primary villain had all of 30 seconds to flesh out their non-existent personalities, same as most of everyone else in a secondary role. You couldn't really care less who's being shot and who's being tased (yes, tased.)
Despite being happy to hear the original Robocop theme, the rest of the music score was terrible. Under par and misplaced. The action sequences were mostly rubbish and uninspired. The best is the one where he tackles two ED-209's, and it lasts about two minutes.
There are hardly any decent one-liners. Seems to be an art lost to the 80's. Robocop wasn't really Robocop very often. He spent all of maybe nine minutes chasing and taking out bad guys, the rest was training and family time. As if that wasn't bad enough, this film has Spiderman 3 syndrome, revealing Murphy's not so pretty face with every given opportunity. He looks vaguely badass with the visor down, but no, let's just flip it up/break it and make him look kind of stupid instead.
The ending is very weak, very perfunctory - it totally runs out of steam and direction in its last third, by which point the unravelling is complete.
Toward the end I was thinking I could score it a 6 at a squeeze, but by the credits it was a comfortable 5.
Not the worst no-brainer or even the worst reboot I've ever scene. It's watchable. But it has the same problematic Hollywood production template that keeps tripping movies up these days: no soul, no thought, no believability, and not much care whether you notice or not.
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