RoboCop

The big surprise is the powerful screenplay which squeezes all it can from the topic and the story even has some overlap of relevance. It takes a slightly different route to the original RoboCop and that certainly does no harm. Routine action is a little restrained, only letting go during the final battle with the chickens. Keaton and Oldman steal the movie, dominating the screen in their scenes together. Alex Murphy has also gone through a certain change. Although Kinnaman doesn’t equal Weller’s qualities, he puts on a really good performance. The ace up the sleeve is director José Padilha who, despite an exhausting struggle with the studio, was able to push a lot of ideas into the project (the studio rejected nine out of every ten ideas) and details that push RoboCop upward. Next time, give it freer rein and it’ll be bombastic. (06/02/2014)

Unlike many, it would appear, it was clear to me beforehand that Hollywood would not allow Padilha to fumble through the film the way he has done with his slum opuses, so I am thrilled with the result. Especially given that he still retained his directorial handwriting and immense talent for sustaining the momentum of sequences that could easily have been built on cutting between three static shots. As a result, the average shot length is longer than most genre trailers, and the camera often dances around action sequences to keep an overview of seemingly unanchored action that is only pinned down by set pieces (a shootout in an alley, a mock battle in a factory hall, the destruction of an ED-209 in a lobby). The reshoots from the long shots, which Padilha is very fond of using to capture action, however challenging it is to seeing the protagonist's point of view, are so smooth and non-evasive that any Branagh could envy them, and I generally enjoyed the whole thing. Compared to its predecessor, it does lack the punkish revelry in the destruction of both body and property, but while it retains the obligatory quotes, it doesn't routinely copy individual elements and finds its own alternatives to them. Namely, for example, Robocop defeating the ED-209 mecha-guards, whose firepower superiority is once again countered by their lack of agility, but this time it is their sheer numbers and thus their tactical inadequacy that is used to defeat them. (19/05/2014)

Values (moral, personal, familial), likable anti-American critique (toothless, inoffensive), action with only one truly distinctive scene (the warehouse), and the strangled potential of wanting to play out at least one of the themes a little stronger. Or, it’s a perfectly Hollywood fluffy nothing that is held afloat only by Kinnaman's undeniable charisma. 3 ½. (09/12/2014)

The effort for interesting psychology and the ambiguity of both the main and secondary characters is worth praise, and so, thanks God, is the absence of a dull, straightforward plot. What was popular in the 1980s would definitely not be as popular now (or only in a new guise). Surprisingly, the film fails the most in the action, which is both scarce and not great. From a 100 million action movie, I would expect a greater impact. At the same time, it is evident that they lacked skill for a grander and, above all, more detailed production, clearly visible, for example, in the similarly expensive but much better executed Minority Report. (16/02/2014)

It isn’t usual for an expensive blockbuster (and especially a remake of an action movie of the eighties) to put its money on ambiguous characters, a moral dilemma about the limits of “humanness" or a criticism of America as the self-proclaimed “global policemen who should clear up their own mess at home"; all of this of course (unfortunately) toned down to large-budget proportions and diluted by the mandatory (and superfluous) SFX action ingredient, but all in all the course they chose was still entertaining, I tell you. (07/02/2014)