Robocop (2014)

First things first: go into your hard-drive, open your memory banks, select the 1987 RoboCop file, and delete it. Anyone going in expecting this to live up to their expectations of the original is going to be sorely disappointed, as gone is the over-the-top violence (this being given a wider-audience friendly 12a cert) and the over-the-top satirical nature (no dinosaurs selling cars this time round). In their place, we get some very intelligent moral and ethical questions being asked in the midst of an entertaining sci-fi shoot 'em up.

Opening up a few decades in the future, where American robots are keeping the peace in what looks like an already peaceful Tehran, we have Samuel L Jackson doing his best Bill O'Reilly impression, hosting a show that is live-feed'ing the audience some footage of suicide bombers. From there, we meet Officer Murphy (Joel Kinnaman, decent), who gets car-bombed by the crime-boss he's been investigating. Jump to Michael Keaton, playing a sort of Evil Bruce Wayne, who is privately-funding Gary OIdman's genius doctor who builds the suit to keep Murphy alive, as well as becoming a new form of defence on home soil.

In case you hadn't noticed, this version of Robocop is not so much taking pot-shots at the excessive commercialism like the original, but instead going for the jugular of the current political climate. Anyone with a passing knowledge of the stuff that Jon Stewart complains about on a nightly basis will find something to chew on here, but all this pumped up IQ does come at a price, with the fun-level lowered quite a bit from the original.

Yes, we know, we should be taking this movie on its own merits, but a movie about a cop that is half-human, half-robot sounds like it SHOULD be a lot of fun, and while there is some half-way decent action scenes to be found here, there's not nearly enough of them. They also have a fair smack of video-games to them, although that feels like it may have been the point. Plus whenever the story drifts away from the big issues towards Murphy's home life (Abbie Cornish is underwritten and underused as Mrs Murphy), or the crime-boss plot (far and away the least interesting part of the movie), the quality dips noticeably.

Still though, in telling the story as a kind of futuristic Frankenstein, or a conglomerate Captain America, this really is a strong step in a new direction for a potential franchise. If they can keep their thinking caps on while upping the explosion count for part two, then this could be the beginning of something special.