Robocop (2014)

(M) ★★

Director: José Padilha.

Cast: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Jennifer Ehle, Jay Baruchel, Samuel L. Jackson.

"You look ... different."

Reboots and remakes aren't necessarily a bad thing.

Without them we wouldn't have Martin Scorsese's The Departed, Steven Soderbergh's Ocean's 11, the Coens' True Grit, or John Carpenter's The Thing, nor would we have seen Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy or Marc Webb's recent The Amazing Spider-man.

These "re-imaginings" only work when the new film gets exactly what it was that made the original movie or character tick. They may tinker with things but they understand the reason the idea existed in the first place.

This remake of Robocop doesn't get it.

In fact, it's strangely boring, which would seem impossible when you're talking about a movie where a half-man-half-robot police officer runs around shooting things for nearly two hours. How can that be boring?

Whereas the original film asked what this half-man-half-robot police officer represented and what kind of society could allow him to come into being, the new version is more concerned with how he works, leading to a seemingly endless origin story involving countless scenes where Robocop is either operated on, tweaked or tested.

José Padilha's remake attempts to humanise Alex Murphy aka Robocop (Kinnaman) and address the issue of where the man starts and the machine ends, but misses out thanks to a disconnecting performance from Kinnaman and the fact the original was so good because it was a cleverly dark satirical comedy that just happened to star a killer man-bot who blew things up.

The satire is almost entirely gone as we watch Murphy dig too deep in the wrong case, end up fatally wounded, and then become a $2.6 Billion Dollar Man with a badge. The closest we get to the wonderfully dystopian humour of the original is in Samuel L. Jackson's hilariously over-the-top bit part as a biased TV show host and Baruchel's blunt PR man.

It's people like Jackson and Baruchel that add some much-needed credibility to this B-grade-with-a-budget actioner.

Oldman and Keaton are solid and bring more detail and gravitas than is necessary to their roles of "reluctantly immoral scientist" and "morally ambiguous businessman" - in fact, the most exciting moments of the film are when the ex-Batman and the former Commissioner Gordon talk things out.

The story does pick up momentum by the end, but Kinnaman's performance doesn't draw any empathy. The big guy has his moments but his expression rolls from mortified to bored with little in between. When Weller's Alex Murphy was gunned down and turned into Robocop, we cared, even though the movie was an exaggerated satire, but audiences will struggle to feel anything for Kinnaman's Murphy, so bland is his character and so lacking is the chemistry between him and Murphy's wife Clara (Cornish) and his son.

There are some ideas in here that are interesting, such as its themes about man vs machine, the war on crime, and of what it is to be human, while a handful of decent performances save proceedings somewhat.

But there is a lack of engagement and freshness that leads to a creeping sense of boredom - not something you would want if you were trying to reboot the Robocop franchise.