Chris At The Pictures

The body of a young boy lies on a cold slab. A doctor slowly removes the child’s brain, in search of a tumour that could be the key to solving a terrible crime. Restless detectives wait with baited breath. And in the back row, someone is snoozing.

Anthony Hopkins is the star of this incandescently dull mystery thriller, as is his dreadful hair: think Rutger Hauer, only without the talent. A killer with a unique way of offing his victims is on the loose, so FBI agents Joe Merriweather (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Katherine Cowles (poor Abbie Cornish mired yet again) draft in Joe’s old friend John Clancy (Hopkins) to assist in the search.

Oh, and John has psychic powers, too. It’s never fully explained, and everyone seems perfectly happy with it. No-one ever says “Um, shouldn’t this guy be studied, questioned or hired full-time?” The closest we come to any kind of curiosity emerges from Cowles’ careerist cop, and even then her questions are deflected by Hopkins’ irritable dialogue. Cornish does what she can to salvage a poorly-constructed role, but Morgan and Hopkins lapse right into the deadpan script as though it were scented bathwater.

I thought twice about bringing up a player who arrives towards the end for fear of spoilers, but his name is plastered so heavily over what posters the distributor could be bothered to put up that I’m just gonna go ahead: shock horror, it’s Colin ‘Please go see me in The Lobster instead’ Farrell! And what a surprise, turns out he’s just as placid and lifeless as his cohorts! I would say that’s the closest thing to consistency we’re going to discover in Solace, but the predictability and unintentional hilarity are steadfast features, also.

This is cinematic mystery in its most boilerplate, tab A into slot B form. The acting is boring, the camerawork is veiled in an ugly grey and the music choices are laughable; everything about it just sends you into a stupor. The barest glimpse of a decent supernatural premise is given an overdose of sleeping pills and doesn’t wake up.

When news, on-set photos and trailers finally emerged about the remake of RoboCop, Paul Verhoevens 1987 action flick about a debilitated police officer consigned to a robotic suit, you could practically feel waves of cynicism emanating from the internet. The issue with remaking this film is pretty much the same faced by 2012’s Total Recall: it’s a big budget eighties action movie that was massively successful and has gone on to become regarded as a classic. The difference is that whilst Total Recall (the remake) tried too much to change the formula of the story (Mars was replaced with Australia), the trailers and promotional material seemed to denote that RoboCop was merely an updating of the original story with CG effects and contemporary actors.

Considering the less than friendly response to the news of the new movie (I can’t deny being very sceptical at first), plus the fairly mediocre trailer, it’s a great relief to say that the remake is actually very well done. The main moral issue that was briefly raised in the original but sank beneath the brash action set-pieces is brought back to the forefront in this version, best exemplified in a startlingly bleak sequence in which detective Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is shown the full extent of his transformation into the Robocop suit by Dr. Norton (Gary Oldman), unable to cope with his less than half human existence and asks Norton to end it.

The other political and moral issues concerning the ethics of keeping Murphy alive, the blurred lines between man and machine and the issue of technology as protection are all raised in their own distinct ways, the former two being played out between Oldman’s character and Sellars, the owner of Omnicorp (Michael Keaton giving his best shot at a morally suspect, moustache-twirling villain), and the latter brought to the forefront by Samuel L. Jackson as a Fox News style presenter in a series of propaganda-like news reports, claiming that America is ‘Robophobic’ and presses the case for America to exploit its drone technology from the Middle East on home soil (rather symbolic considering the controversy surrounding the real-life use of such drones by the US Army in its overseas operations).

As for the action sequences, the main selling point for most people, they’re fairly well executed, packing a great punch in terms of sound design and visual effects, the use of handheld cam placing the audience in the thick of the fight, although it should be noted that this handheld element does find its way, rather distractingly, into the much more quiet, intimate scenes involving Murphy’s wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) and son (John Paul Ruttan). This may be an attempt to liven up these small vignettes as the acting by Cornish is a little uninspiring and the brief moment she shares with her husband before his accident seems fairly rushed. This means investment in their relationship is a little on the light side, and the family drama supposedly at the heart of the story seems like a sideshow in comparison to the much more interesting scenes between Murphy and Norton, the latter played sublimely by Oldman, who seems to only improve with age.

So on the whole, RoboCop may lack the family drama we were promised and some of the acting is less than impressive, but the perfectly fine, nuts and bolts actions sequences are up there with the original and the moral/political issues at its heart are still relevant and hold their own amongst the other elements of the story. A worthy remake, but a fairly functional film on its own.

3.5 Stars