Boxoffice® Pro - February 2014

REMAKES &
REBOOTS
AN ACCLAIMED FOREIGN
FILMMAKER VENTURES INTO
HOLLYWOOD BY TAKING ON A
PROJECT WITH A B-MOVIE TITLE
AND A BIG-STUDIO BUDGET. SOUND
FAMILIAR? BRAZILIAN DIRECTOR
JOSÉ PADILHA FOLLOWS PAUL
VERHOEVEN’S STEPS WHILE
BLAZING HIS OWN PATH IN THE
REMAKE OF THE 1987 SCIENCE-
FICTION HIT.
By Daniel Loria
Swedish-American actor Joel
Kinnaman steps into the boots
first worn by Peter Weller in
the 1987 original
We should start with the
title. It’s a great title.
OK, so the title is a
bit stupid, yes, but only
in an endearingly obvious
way. I don’t have to know anything about
the movie beforehand; a title like RoboCop gives
me all I need to convince me to see it or not. I
know, for example, that it will involve a robot.
I also know that the robot will be a cop. If I’m
lucky, there will be a ghost in it. Turns out after
seeing it, there are no ghosts in RoboCop.
Despite this minor setback, I left my first
screening of the 1987 film far from disappointed.
I tend to prefer dumb movies with
smart ideas over smart movies with dumb
ideas. Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was
released that same year. RoboCop
offers the identical level of insight
on Reagan-era excess with only half
the talking and the added benefit of
robots fighting each other.
RoboCop tells the story of a
Detroit in the year 2029 mired in
deep corruption and financial ruin.
A private company, Omni Consumer
Products (OCP), offers to
privatize the city’s struggling police
department in exchange for the right
to redevelop a large swath of the city
into a gentrified haven for the upper
class, a new, renovated community
named Delta City.
OCP intends to deploy its new
product, a clunky armored
robot known as the ED-209,
in the crime-ridden streets of
Detroit, in hopes that they
can expand their business to
cities across the country. The
product is derailed, however,
after it malfunctions and
murders an executive in the middle of a
board meeting. A compromise is reached by
shelving the ED-209 model and instead
placing an honest cop killed in action
into a mechanical exoskeleton and
bringing him back to life as a cyborg to
police the streets of Detroit. RoboCop
is programmed with clear directives
meant to ensure the safety of Detroit’s
citizens—and the protection of the
corrupt business dealings of its parent
company. The cyborg can’t seem to
forget memories from his human life,
however, and begins to unravel a web
of corruption that leads back to his
corporate overlords. RoboCop’s
fight for justice in Detroit also
becomes a personal quest to
discover the human identity he
left behind.
RoboCop was Dutch director
Paul Verhoeven’s first
16 BoxOffice ® Pro The Business of Movies FEBRUARY 2014