I still haven't watched the original films, but otherwise, I agree entirely with the review. In fact, for most of the film I kept thinking "well, that scene was just OK/we didn't really need it, but it wasn't bad, and the film will get better" up until the terrible point-blank shoot-out against the big walkers when I finally realised that was it, and the film had no ambition of going beyond passable. In the end, I gave it a 3/10 for completely wasting my time, but that "It has to get better" feel was pretty much a one-of-a-kind experience.
Oh, and about the characters: one thing that really stuck out for some reason was how that female Asian assistant had like 15-20 lines throughout the film (more than quite a few other supporting characters, come to think of it) and yet, it's literally all exposition, and we never learn anything about her. When so many films, including recent ones, created memorable characters with just 5 lines or so, it really underscores how artistically void the whole thing was.
Leave a Comment:
The Worst of Mediocrity
I am not a diehard RoboCop fan. I don't have any waxing nostalgia for the original movies. I saw them, for the first time, exactly one week before watching this one. And I didn't particularly like them. They had all the elements for So Bad, It's Good, but failed on the execution and left me yawning. That being said, this movie improved my opinion of the originals, because it made them look good by comparison.
What was obviously being attempted here was a combo of Darker And Grittier while keeping the charm of the originals. And it just did not come together. No action scene was memorable. We even lost the iconic scene of Alex Murphy being pumped full of lead for a quick explosion. Not a single sequence made me sit up and say "Holy shit! That was cool!" If there was a decent Holy Shit Quotient, it might have made it possible to overlook some of the film's other sins (take Terminator for example). As it was, there was no awesome action to break up the parade of worn out tropes, poorly developed characters, and flat acting. One of my biggest complaints on the original was that they did not focus enough on Murphy as a person before he was RoboCop to make me care about his loss of humanity and his family afterward. I could see the attempt to fix that in this film, but the execution spectacularly failed. By the first time Claire was crying, I was thinking I Dont Care What Happens To These People. And by shifting focus to the family, they took the one relationship that was well developed from the original, and threw it into a satellite character. Lewis might as well have died in the first scene. It would not have affected the rest of the movie in the slightest.
As always though, Gary Oldman was a joy to watch. If you could say any bad movie had a saving grace, it's casting him. But if that's the only positive point you have, is it really a positive?
In the end, it was a mediocre script, with a mediocre cast, and a mediocre execution. Thoroughly unnecessary as the original movie pretty much took us on that trip already and - unbelievably - did a better job of it.