MOVIES REVIEWS

RoboCop Movie Review

ByChiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Feb 12, 2014

Title: RoboCop

Director: José Padilha

Starring: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Samuel L. Jackson, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Michael K. Williams.

Here comes 2014’s nth remake movie. After more than 20 years from the original ‘RoboCop,’ Brazilian director José Padilha (best known for the action film ‘Elite Squad’) brings back to the silver screen the legendary human-robot.

In the year 2028 the multinational conglomerate OmniCorp is at the centre of robot technology and their drones have been used overseas by the military for years. But the Dreyfuss Act, a publicly supported act is preventing their use locally. To circumvent these laws, OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton), in conjunction with scientist Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman), creates a new law enforcement product by combining human and machine. The chosen man will be policeman Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), after he is critically injured by a car-bomb, and is selected for the RoboCop program with the consent of his wife, Clara (Abbie Cornish). The tin-cop will gradually make feelings prevail on his robotic devise, unleashing a very severe and rhetorical critique of the use of weapons in the United States.

Padilha manages to cunningly withdraw from comparisons to the eighties original flick, as he chooses to explore drone warfare and the consequent moral implications of how armies and countries may be held accountable for their actions.

Joel Kinnaman embodies brilliantly the tin-cop, as he shifts from the automat feelingless mode to a more emotional one. However the peripheral characters aren’t less effective, on the contrary: Oldman’s Norton is utterly torn between moral and ambition; Michael Keaton offers an enjoyably power maniacal character; Samuel L. Jackson’s TV celebrity-evangelist has a boisterous satire; and delicate Abbie Cornish quietly portrays a loving wife who tries to smother her visceral turmoil to keep her family together. All in all RobCop’s reboot is an entertaining science-fiction blockbuster, although [SPOILER ALERT] it’s irksome how the final shots blatantly lay the ground for a sequel.

Technical: A

Acting: B+

Story: B

Overall: B+

Written by: Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

robocop movie poster

By Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi

Chiara Spagnoli Gabardi, is a film critic, culture and foreign affairs reporter, screenwriter, film-maker and visual artist. She studied in a British school in Milan, graduated in Political Sciences, got her Masters in screenwriting and film production and studied at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute in New York and Los Angeles. Chiara’s “Material Puns” use wordplay to weld the title of the painting with the materials placed on canvas, through an ironic reinterpretation of Pop-Art, Dadaism and Ready Made. She exhibited her artwork in Milan, Rome, Venice, London, Oxford, Paris and Manhattan. Chiara works as a reporter for online, print, radio and television and also as a film festival PR/publicist. As a bi-lingual journalist (English and Italian), who is also fluent in French and Spanish, she is a member of the Foreign Press Association in New York, the Women Film Critics Circle in New York, the Italian Association of Journalists in Milan and the Federation of Film Critics of Europe and the Mediterranean. Chiara is also a Professor of Phenomenology of Contemporary Arts at IED University in Milan.

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