Even with  story problems, poorly executed effects, lack of a compelling villain and lackluster action, the worst sin committed by the remake of RoboCop is that is very, very boring.

In the year 2028, Omnicorp has robot peace keeping drones deployed in strife ridden areas of the world but the one market they cannot crack is the United States where legislation blocks the implementation of drones and robots for policing the streets. To skirt this issue, and to address the complaint that there is no human component in the decision making, OCP CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) decides they need to put a man into a machine. He enlists his top robotics guy Dr Dennet Norton (Gary Oldman) to make this happen. None of the candidates that they looked at fit the bill. Enter Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnamen), a detective hot on the trail of a gun trafficking operation run by Antoine Vallon (Patrick Garrow) with participation with some dirty cops who is blown up in a car bomb after his partner, Lewis (Micheal K Williams), is put in the hospital.  Omnicorp gets Murphy’s wife (Abbie Cornish) to sign the releases and they put what is left of Alex, namely his head, lungs and, for some reason, his right hand into a cybernetic body. Then they argue a lot about whether or not his humanity is a liability for about an hour and a half.

In interest of full disclosure, I adore the original RoboCop. It still holds up today and still has plenty to say. That being said, when I review remakes, I do not compare one to the other because it really isn’t fair to hold a new film to nostalgic standard.If you are interested in a comparative analysis of this versus the original, check out this Gentlemen Radio episode in which we discuss this to much greater detail. The short answer to how this stacks up against the original is that it does not at all. But it really doesn’t have to ultimately and if a remake can offer a compelling argument for a new take on the material in a new and exciting way then it can still be a fun and interesting experience. Unfortunately RoboCop fails to do this either.

As mentioned above, the greatest sin that RoboCop commits is that it is desperately boring for most of its run time and is the equivalent to watching corporate board meetings in which the boss asks for something, the team doesn’t quite get it, the boss tells them to make it work, they do and something else breaks. Rinse and repeat. That is the meat of the movie. Endless meetings between Sellars and Norton with marketing guy Tom Pope (Jay Baruchel) and occasionally weapons and tactics guy Rick Mattox (Jackie Earl Haley) in which they tinker with RoboCop to try to sort out various issues. It is just as dry as it sounds and it is incredibly dull.

When the film tries to move into weightier stuff with Murphy struggling with humanity they make a terrible mistake by starting him off aware of what he is now and having his cerebral and emotional humanity completely intact. There is some drama available here but it is given the short shrift in a movie with its priorities completely out of whack. There are a lot of missed opportunities for compelling interactions here between Murphy and his wife and child as well as his partner but those are wasted. The fact that the film fails to establish Murphy as a compelling character from the get go does these efforts no favors and removes feeling from the audience even further.

The focus of the film is really crooked and things like Murphy overriding programming and trying to solve his own murder are given the back seat to watching Norton tweaking Murphy’s dopamine levels ad nauseam and occasionally showing Murphy shooting drones in test environments. Some of this stuff is important to explain things and build the world but it goes on far too long and does so at the expense of character development.

The character development issue is devastating to the movie as you really don’t have anyone to root for or against. There is no real central villain aside from Vallon and he does next to nothing. Sellars is cast as a villain eventually but this is a bit of a stretch as very little of what he does in the movie could be considered villainous behavior. Likewise, Murphy is not drawn into a real character and remains something of a cipher. This is weird as his mannerisms and slang as RoboCop are out of place and feel off and weird but at the same time there is very little substance to him anyway because of the lack of development.

This is not the fault of the performances, however, as they are very good on the whole. Michael Keaton is always fun to watch and Gary Oldman was so good he almost had to have thought he was in another movie. I like Jay Baruchel and Jackie Earl Haley too much to want them in this movie but they both acquit themselves well here. Joel Kinnaman does well with what he has although I disagree very strongly about the take on Murphy here.  These performances don’t do much to help the movie though. There is too much else going wrong.

One would think in 2014 we could have better effects than this. I say that mostly because we do in other, better movies. The effects here aren’t a complete failure but there are far to many silly or questionable effects to get behind the film on that level as well. I shouldn’t be seeing RoboCop in 2014 run like the Flash from the TV series in 1990. Frankly RoboCop probably shouldn’t be running at all but whatever, I am not going to compare. If the running had looked good I wouldn’t have minded. As it was Forrest Gump looked more badass running.

The film also missed a lot of opportunities for clever social commentary with only Pat Novak (Samuel L Jackson) and his O’Rielly Factor like TV show to provide any political statements or commentary. This is too bad because we could have seen what future social media thought of RoboCop or how the prevalence of the internet affected politics and public opinion in the future but the movie didn’t touch on any of that. Obviously if the director doesn’t want to talk about that then that is fine, it is his choice but it is somewhat baffling to find that he didn’t want to do something more interesting than he did. My only answer is that he did not understand what he had.

Conclusion [3.5 out of 10]

I could go on and on about all the things I think are wrong with this RoboCop but the bottom line is really just that it is boring and unimpressive. This is something I never thought I would say about RoboCop but here we are. This distilled the story down to the most uninteresting version. I don’t recommend anyone see this but if you curiosity gets the best of you and you must see it, I cannot recommend that you pay anywhere near full price. It will be on cable eventually or on Netflix.