Robocop (2013)

This one came out awhile back but now you can pick it up on DVD or BLU RAY so I did just that. The premise in this one is pretty simple. There is a big corporation that wants to have robots take over policing in foreign nations and in America to save lives. The new robot police are supposed to be able to tell who is who and determine combatants from non-threat’s but we all know how that works out in movies.

At some point Omnicorp decides, screw it, we are just going to find a human to make into a robot-cop, queue the candidates and we wind up with Alex Murphy. So far, so good right? Yes. Then disaster strikes. Where we used to have really great bad guys that you couldn’t wait to see taken down, we have Michael Keaton who we kinda don’t really care about. Yes, he is jerk and probably deserves to die but that is the central problem here. We don’t care, we don’t care about Murphy who is at the very least un-likable, we don’t think the villains are worth needing a ROBOCOP to kill, we don’t care about Samuel L Jackson because his talent is wasted as filler by making him a talk show host. Yeah, this thing is just a flat un-inspired disaster once it gets going. Even the parts I did like never really pull the emotional or action strings they need to. The only really decent performance in this comes from Gary Oldman and even great talents like Jackie Earle Haley (who’s played Rorschach and Freddy Kruger over the years) and Abbie Cornish (Suckerpunch) are under used.

I am actually sighing right now while writing this because I so badly wanted this to be decent. It’s not and that may be because I am comparing it to an over the top original that captured the gritty side of heroes in a way that we hadn’t seen before. Unfortunately this time around, there is nothing new, nothing connecting and very little worth your time. Even a really solid villain would have helped.

I give this one a 3 out of 7. RATING DEFINITION : JUST ALRIGHT. This is the movie you put in your BLU RAY or DVD player and watched when you are bored out of your freaking mind. You have exhausted all of your Netflix and Hulu options and now you feel like watching something that you don’t have to pay too much attention to… because if you do, you might as well just let a live raccoon loose in your house while zombies are chasing you with hot frying pans. You don’t mind the mess maybe once or twice…but after awhile you are thinking to yourself…why? Why? Why the hot frying pans?