Well, I saw it last night. Nowhere near as bad as I expected, and certainly nowhere near as bad as the Total Recall remake, and eons better than Robocop 3. I liked the way Robocop was introduced in this one, but by the time of the climax, it steered into familiar territory. With its PG-13 rating, the movie, of course, plays it safe, and the real-world politics the film takes jabs at come across as lazy. Still, I thought the movie was pretty okay.
I didn't think it was a bad movie (although I liked Dredd better). And hey, I only paid $3.50 to see it, so that's a plus.
Some things I liked:
- The focus on the wife and kid, it was kind of glossed over in the original while here it was very central.
- Some cool money shots (like when they reveal how much of Alex is actually left).
- The higher tech of this iteration (with downloading the files into his brain... pretty wild).
- An even LARGER sense that Murphy is just a company asset, the way they can essentially first hard-wire the machine aspect of him to take over in combat situations (so he has the illusion of free will versus actually making the decisions), and then later when they change his dopamine balance so he becomes very machine-like. There might be a man in there somewhere, but they even toy around with that. Murphy in the first movie, after he was rebuilt, never really went through that -- he just reacquired a sense of himself and was constantly become more self-aware, whereas here he got dialed down more and more at the whims of the company.
Yet still sadly there's no real high plot point. Even the event that maimed Murphy doesn't have much emotional impact. And here a lot of the plot points just seem to happen without any real movement through an overreaching arc. It all felt rather flat. I actually was wondering what time it was, a number of times, which I don't view as a good sign. In the end, not much of the movie was actually memorable even if I have trouble picking out any terrible moments. The first movies had more flaws/silliness in spots but also was more memorable. I think the R rating might have helped here, tbh.
Samuel L. Jackson plays comic relief here. I did crack up at the end when he goes off on a shitfit on the scientist. That was amusing, he was so livid.