Runtime: 1 hours, 48 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: José Padilha
Quick Impressions:
Last week, my husband and I were so excited to see The Monuments Men, and then on the way to the theater, we got in a wreck. Before we could get off the highway, we saw four other wrecks (including one really scary one). Could we have made it to the theater on time? No. Could we have made it to a later showing? Probably. But we weren’t particularly taken with the idea of driving across town, dragging the left half of our rear bumper while all around us people kept spinning out on the ice and hydroplaning all over the road. So we went home and watched the Olympics instead. (Tricks on the ice are way more fun to watch when they don’t end in fiery death.)
We could have seen The Monuments Men tonight, but as we hopped into our rental car, we both agreed it made more sense to see instead this week’s new release, RoboCop.
I’ve never seen the original RoboCop. Even I don’t know how that’s possible. (Maybe it’s because I was eight the summer it came out, and it was rated R, though that argument is somewhat weakened by the strange fact that my parents let me watch Fatal Attraction the same year.)
You’d think I would have at least seen it on TV as a kid. I mean, when I was in elementary school, RoboCop was very cool, a huge cultural phenomenon. (My husband’s seen it. He tells me that the best part is when the bad guy asks one of his henchmen, “Can you fly, Bobby?” and then throws him out of the back of a moving car during high speed chase on the highway. That sounds fun, I agree (though probably not for Bobby).)
My point is, I went into this movie with no preconceived notions of what a RoboCop movie ought to deliver. (Well, I mean, I was expecting a guy in a robotic suit. And I was pretty sure he was going to be some kind of cop.)
To my shock—because 1) action movies aren’t really my thing, and 2) action movies released in February are usually so bad—I really enjoyed this iteration of RoboCop. It’s a cool movie, fun to watch and surprisingly philosophical. Plus what it lacks in subtlety, it makes up for in Samuel L. Jackson. (I got such a rush just watching Jackson having so much fun. He makes such bold choices as an actor, and you can tell he’s really enjoying this role.)
The Good:
RoboCop would be a great movie to show to a high school class (if the administrators would let you). It could spark some tremendous, productive philosophical discussions. Even though the movie’s main goal is clearly entertainment, RoboCop is surprisingly deep. It gives us a lot to think about. I’m quite sure that after watching it (especially with prodding), some young viewers will realize, “Wait! There’s a hidden message in this movie,” and think they’re geniuses for finding it.
What does it mean to be human? What separates humans from machines? Is a human’s emotionally skewed discernment ever preferable to a machine’s unbiased rationality? Do certain circumstances require human intervention, or is the mechanical efficiency of a well-built machine always superior? Is what’s ethical always the same as what’s practical?
Probably my favorite thing about the film is that its most heroic supporting character is so terribly flawed. This is not a movie where the “good guys” always make all the right choices at every minute. In RoboCop, one of the people who ends up saving a key person’s life at the end makes some very ethically dubious choices before that.
For an action movie, RoboCop features a surprisingly compelling assortment of characters. In fact, throughout the movie, I kept vacillating. At times, one character seems so much more sympathetic than the others. Would this person turn out to be a villain in the end in a shocking plot twist? Or would the person turn into a huge villain gradually? Wondering about this made the film wonderfully engaging and legitimately suspenseful. For a computer, everything is either black or white, good or bad, on or off. But for a human, there are a lot of messy shades of gray. Human life certainly isn’t perfect, neat, or particularly efficient.
The movie seems to suggest that navigating human life requires discernment and a grasp of nuance. Robots don’t have that that kind of discernment. People do. But they don’t have to use it. Behaving like a human and using one’s discernment is a choice. RoboCop makes a pretty compelling case that to choose not to use human discernment is horrifically irresponsible. Let machines be machines. We’re human. We should act like it.
Another thing that I love about the movie is that it makes us question what about us makes us who we are. (The answer is that it’s something inside us, maybe even something beyond our biochemistry. Whatever it is, it’s definitely not our exterior.) In the same vein, the film features some of the most colorblind casting I’ve ever seen in an American action movie. In RoboCop we cannot judge a person’s character based on what he or she looks like on the outside. Now in real life, that principle is (hopefully) obvious. But in action movies, it is really not all that obvious. While watching the movie, I started thinking about race because of a joke that Alex’s partner makes when he returns wearing a black suit. Then I realized, “The usual annoying racial stereotypes—or overcorrection of old stereotypes—are pretty much absent from this movie.” RoboCop acts like race is just not a factor. The color of someone’s skin really does not matter in this story. Anyone can be a “bad guy.” Anyone can be a “good guy.” (But just like in real life, most characters in this story do the right thing at some moments, the wrong thing at others.) I sure hope that ten years in the future, we all judge people’s actions on a case by case basis instead of making sweeping generalizations based on appearance.
For an action movie, RoboCop is reasonably well written, and it’s superbly acted. I will never understand why more action franchises don’t cast people who can act in the leading roles. (I mean, yes, it’s nice to have a pretty star inspiring people to buy tickets, but if you cast somebody who excels at acting, your movie is just going to be so much better.)
The movie starts strong by giving us a very energized Samuel L. Jackson right off the bat. RoboCop has done nothing to dissuade me of the notion that Jackson is the coolest person on earth, by the way. He’s clearly having so much fun here, and yet he brings an intensity to the role that gives the movie a lot of extra power. Jackson makes bold choices. He seems like a smart guy. He’s wonderfully charismatic, and he’s willing to take huge risks as an artist if that’s what it takes to make a great film. (How many other people would even consider taking the role of an evil house slave, possibly even more villainous than his sociopathic master? How many other people have had the opportunity to say, “Stop begging, George Lucas. Fine, I’ll play a Jedi master in Star Wars, but only if you’ll let me have a purple light saber.” That’s not a direct quote, but that’s what happened.) Jackson’s one of a kind, and his performance draws us in immediately and adds a lot to the film.
Speaking of great actors, Gary Oldman (playing Dr. Dennett Norton) practically makes the movie. He’s phenomenal here. In his first scene, I thought, Well, it’s nice to see him, and it must be relaxing for him to play a role that doesn’t ask a lot of him as an actor. Boy did I misjudge this movie! An actor lacking Oldman’s caliber of talent and skill could never pull of his character. And if the character was lackluster, the movie would probably be kind of disappointing, too. You watch a movie like this and think, Well it’s a lot of fun, but this isn’t the kind of thing that wins Oscars. Seriously, though, Oldman gives an Oscar worthy performance here. (I’m not saying he’ll get a nomination. That would be crazy. But still, Gary Oldman is Gary Oldman, and he’s given a lot more to work with in RoboCop than I initially expected.) (One weird thing—I kept mishearing and thinking people were calling him “Bennett Gordon.” I thought, Surely his last name can’t be Gordon. They’d rewrite the script and change the character’s name after casting Oldman, wouldn’t they? But apparently, the answer is, I’m just deaf.)
Another great actor is Michael Keaton. Seriously, he’s kind of an 1980s icon, anyway, because of stuff like Batman and Beetlejuice, but people tend to kind of overlook what a great actor he can be. I don’t understand why Keaton has been absent from mainstream cinematic attention for so long. I’m not aware of anything serious that he’s done recently outside of his voice work for Pixar, so maybe there’s a story there I don’t know. I’ll have to read up on Keaton later. But I know I was really glad to see him, and I think he’s wonderful in the part of Omnicore “visionary” Raymond Sellars.
Jackie Earle Haley is yet another heavy-hitting actor in the cast. He’s great as the abrasive Rick Mattox. If a lesser actor were playing the part, the character would be so forgettable. (I know because I’ve seen and failed to be impressed by a lot of action movies.) Haley makes Mattox so entertaining and yet so easy to root against.
Michael K. Williams is really great, too. (I wish he had a bigger part. I liked his character a lot, and I wanted to see more of him.) In smaller roles, Jay Baruchel, Marianne Jean-Baptiste, and Patrick Garrow also excel.
Meanwhile, Jennifer Ehle keeps up her tradition of being completely unrecognizable to me when she’s not speaking with an English accent. (Seriously, I have some kind of mental block when it comes to Ehle. Not only do I fail to recognize her every time she’s not British, but I always spend at least half the movie thinking, Who is that woman? She’s too strong an actress not to be somebody. She looks a little like Meryl Streep, but she can’t be her daughter, because her main daughter looks exactly like Meryl Streep. Still she seems like she must be somebody’s daughter. When I saw her name in the end credits, I was like, Seriously, brain? Every time Jennifer Ehle is in a movie you go through this same thought process. (Seriously I did it when I saw her in Zero Dark Thirty and The Ides of March.) You can’t remember that’s Jennifer Ehle? And while we’re on the subject, I doubt Meryl Streep introduces Mamie Gummer to people by saying, “This is my main daughter.” And by the way, Ehle is the daughter of Rosemary Harris.)
Abbie Cornish also made an impression on me as Alex’s wife, something she’s failed to do in the past. As written, the character has a lot of potential, and Cornish delivers in the role.
The new RoboCop himself, Joel Kinnaman is a complete unknown to me (though according to his filmography, I saw him in the American remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo). I think he’s as convincing as anyone can be as a guy who’s still functioning after losing everything but his face, one eye, parts of his brain, a hand, and his heart and lungs. Casting someone who isn’t well known was probably a smart move. We don’t have to worry about what star we’re watching. We just believe that Kinnaman is RoboCop and enjoy the story as it unfolds. And he is, honestly, a pretty good actor.
Best Scene:
Samuel L. Jackson bookends this entire piece pretty brilliantly. Before we even set eyes on Alex Murphy (played by a guy who is not a recognizable star), we get sucked into the energetic, charismatic performance of Jackson. What we see on his show-within-a-show is pretty gripping. I actually found myself surprised to be so drawn into the early action scene in “sunny Tehran.” The way the scene ends—and particularly Jackson’s reaction to it—really gets our attention. And Jackson’s final scene—well, I won’t soon forget it. That’s for sure.
I’m also a big fan of the moment when a character whose ultimate destiny has been unclear finally decides to do the right thing.
Best Action Sequence:
The ending of the movie is strangely gripping. I usually find it hard to lose myself in action movies, but this time I felt a surge of adrenaline and realized I really wanted RoboCop to win. Even more than that, I wanted the “bad guy” to lose.
Honestly, though, the early training exercise thought up by Jackie Earle Haley’s character is pretty well choreographed as well, and the music they use there is interesting.
Best Scene Visually:
The way Robocop sees the world is cool. I’m a big fan of the way his interaction with his wife looks, when she stops him in the street to give him some news about their son.
The Negatives:
In case you somehow miss the cautionary tale buried in this action flick, in case you somehow fail to notice the real world application of the moral of this story, in case that’s just too much for you to follow, for your convenience in the final scene of the film, Samuel L. Jackson turns to stare directly into the camera and then screams out the warning you should take home with you at the top of his lungs.
So if you leave RoboCop unaware that the filmmakers want you to ponder something that applies to present day politics, then I don’t really know what to say to you. Nothing I say can possibly be as effective as Samuel L. Jackson yelling at the top of his lungs right in your face. I mean, maybe I could ask Jackson if he’d be willing to throw his costume on, get into character, and then come yell at you in person. That might work. But chances are, you’d be too star struck in his presence, and you’d just miss the point again.
Okay, so this movie is not subtle. At all. For a while, it seems like it’s thinking about being subtle, but it just can’t contain itself. It’s far too excited to drive the point home.
Doubtless, some people will find these shenanigans off-putting, particularly because Samuel L. Jackson seems so gleefully delighted by the whole thing. (Curiously, one patron at our theater burst into applause near the end of Jackson’s final speech, but then abruptly stopped applauding. I will admit that I was confused about the motivation for the applause, and that makes me realize that some people may interpret the movie differently than others.)
The thing is, I don’t fault the movie too much for this lack of subtlety because Jackson’s performance is also satirical. He’s clearly doing his best impression of a type of person (some might even say a particular person) in order to point out the follies of that person/way of thinking. So of course he’s not being subtle or allowing for any sort of nuance. That’s the point.
I’m positive that this ending is going to rub many people the wrong way, however, because of its pointed heavy-handedness. Sometimes you can watch a movie knowing (on some level) that you disagree with a few of its underlying premises as long as those premises never get stated explicitly. But when the final scene of the movie features a character clearly screaming out very specific ideas, it’s a little harder to pretend that the movie is just mindless action and nothing more.
For me, the much larger problem with RoboCop is the way it glosses over all those pesky details at the end. It does one of those convenient time jumps that we almost always get in children’s programming after a situation becomes far too complicated to sort out within the allotted time frame. (It’s very frustrating for children that movies and television teach you exactly how to get into trouble but are so vague when it comes to what you need to do to resolve the messes you create.) Maybe I’m just intrinsically fearful of people with power and money, but to me, what happens in the last action scene seems like such a mess that leaves so many people hideously vulnerable. I’m glad everything gets straightened out in the end, but I must admit I find the fair, just, “and they all lived happily ever after” bit hard to believe.
The only huge downside of the movie is that it forces you to think about advance directives. On the way home from the theater, I had to ask my husband if he would want me to sign the papers allowing him to be turned into a RoboCop. (Of course, this is very pressing.) Now making me into a RoboCop would not be an issue. I know I’d never pass their stringent psych evaluation. I’d be deemed too unstable. My only hope would be that when they ran my bloodwork, they’d notice a teeming midi-chlorian count and decide I have the makings of a Sith Lord. (I certainly have the emotional maturity of one.) I’m joking, of course, but the movie does force you to think about what you would do if your significant other were blown to bits, which is rather depressing.
And then of course there’s that glaring omission that this movie never discusses. The robotic suit gives Alex Murphy back all the body parts that he needs—in a movie rated PG-13. When I mentioned my anxieties to my husband, he decided that instead of worrying, I should just watch the pornographic film inspired by RoboCop (which undoubtedly exists given how few seconds it takes to think of the obvious title). Now obviously, my concern about certain body parts is a bit juvenile, but don’t you think it would be highly important to the character himself? It’s hard to imagine anyone exclaiming, “Gee! How awesome it would be to have no genitals!” (There probably are people out there who wish they had no genitals, but I’m confident they’re in the minority.) With something like that, sexual function is just the tip of the iceberg. And moving beyond just genitalia, beyond even sexuality, I think Alex’s situation is more complex and thorny than the movie acknowledges.
Alex Murphy no longer has a human body. He has very little flesh. (Thankfully he does have a mouth and one hand, so he can still connect with other people in a human way.) But surely being mostly machine is going to make returning to family life difficult. (I mean, right now, he seems to live in a laboratory, which must put a strain on his relationship with his wife.) Now I know that this is not the kind of film that addresses these concerns, but to me, the ending seems less happy than it wants to be because both Alex’s wife and their son are bound to have ongoing psychological distress because of Alex’s unusual condition. Maybe what he’s like on the outside shouldn’t matter, but it probably does matter to him and to his loved ones. To be fair, though, I will admit that the film may be deliberately encouraging us to think about the often unseen, long-term effects of surviving violence.
Overall:
RoboCop is a cool, fun, surprisingly insightful action movie, and I enjoyed it way more than I ever thought I would. The cast is superb, and the story not only delivers thrills and excitement, but it also asks some genuinely thought-provoking philosophical questions. If this is the kind of movie they’re releasing in February this year, then I’m extremely excited about the blockbusters that await us this summer!