RoboCop Review: All Action Films Should Strive For As Much Substance

stars Joel Kinnaman as Alex Murphy, a good, honest cop in the crime-ridden and corrupt city of Detroit. Murphy and his partner, Jack Lewis (Michael K. Williams) are going hard after local crime boss Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow) until Lewis is injured during a shootout. Vallon’s men find Murphy’s car at the hospital and rig it with explosive. That night, the car explodes in Murphy’s driveway, taking most of his body with it.That’s where mega-corporation OmniCorp steps in. OmniCorp has made a fortune selling defense robots to police the streets of countries around the globe, but hasn’t been able to make headway in the United States because citizens dislike the idea of a weaponized, soulless machine making judgment calls on city streets. OmniCorp is in danger of losing any chance of tapping the American market forever as Senator Hubert Dreyfuss (Zach Grenier) is pushing through a bill making robots totally illegal on the streets of the United States.That’s when OmniCorp’s CEO, Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) has an idea: if they can create a robot with a human element then, maybe, they can market it to the American public as a human/robot hybrid hero that gets around the anti-robot laws and sways public opinion. He turns to medical prosthetics researcher Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) to make the project happen. Though Norton, at first, protests, he is quickly swayed when Sellars offers funding for his medical research, and soon they are turning Officer Alex Murphy into RoboCop.RoboCop is very much an action movie, but it is a surprisingly intelligent one. Rather than trying to recapture what Paul Verhoeven accomplished in 1987, Director José Padilha (Elite Squad, Bus 174) decided to bring the character and the concept of RoboCop into the 21st century and examine what it means in the here and now. Where Verhoeven’s RoboCop felt like science fantasy, Padilha’s film feels like it could be a future reality, grounded in the cutting edge prosthetics technology of today and relevant at the dawn of the era of drone warfare.The film’s opening scene in Tehran, where some of OmniCorp’s robots are making random patrols on the street, is a perfect encapsulation of its relevance. To see an entire population made docile, technically safe but totally subjugated, is chilling, and the machines’ inability to differentiate between a suicide bomber and a child wielding a knife is a startling reminder of the dangers of detaching humanity from warfare.