RoboCop

RoboTron

Grade: B –

Director: José Padilha

Starring: Joel Kinnaman, Gary Oldman, Michael Keaton, Abbie Cornish, Jackie Earle Haley, Jay Baruchel and Samuel L. Jackson

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 48 min.

In our present-day of drone technology, governmental surveillance and cyber ubiquity, the reality of RoboCop seems more immediate and ominous than it did upon the original film’s release 27 years ago. That’s the strength of director José Padilha’s slickly produced remake. The chink in the armor, however, is that apart from teasing a few tantalizing themes, the film doesn’t do enough to shed its air of stuffy sameness. Indeed, if 2014 reinvention is your aim, you don’t make a lot of progress by casting Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, (let’s be honest…) Samuel L. Jackson, and someone who rose to popularity as part of the original The Bad News Bears.

Prohibited by law from expanding their lucrative drone robotics program to U.S. city streets, OmniCorp CEO Raymond Sellars (Keaton) teams with scientist Dr. Dennett Norton (Oldman) to develop a human/machine hybrid to circumvent legal strictures and stir up public outcry to repeal the ban. Their PR guinea pig is Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), a Detroit policeman critically injured while investigating crooked cops and a local crime boss. Norton encases Murphy’s surviving brain stem, heart and lungs inside a detachable, weaponized metal suit, whereupon Murphy is tasked to clean up the Motor City’s mean streets.

The crux of RoboCop’s problems is Kinnaman, who exudes a mechanical affect even before his character is pumped full of antipsychotics. There’s little emotional connection, even when he’s mourning a wounded partner (Michael K. Williams), interacting with his wife Clara (Abbie Cornish) and hockey-loving moppet, or essentially being controlled as a literal corporate slave.

Although Padilha scrubs much of the original’s dark humor, there are sardonic flourishes, like the resident paramilitary meathead (Jackie Earle Haley) piping in “If I Only Had a Heart” from The Wizard of Oz during “the Tin Man’s” combat simulation exercise, and Jackson acting as the film’s Shakespearean chorus in the form of a right-wing, corporately-compromised TV show host. Amongst the rest of the supporting cast, Oldman acquits himself best as an earnest but conflicted man of science pushed to compromise his ethics.

Comeuppance for the transgressors comes quickly and with relative ease, such that there’s plenty of opportunity left for Padilha to flesh out the wider, thought-provoking ideas suggested as early as the film’s opening sequence, when OmniCorp robots employed by the U.S. military patrol the streets of Tehran, pacifying the populace at the point of laser cannons while suicide bombers position to strike their metallic occupiers.

However, the film’s intriguing, even affecting first half ultimately surrenders to a harried final third, as the narrative wholly embraces its otherwise tragic Frankenstein’s monster subtext at the expense of still-unexplored social and political conundrums. RoboCop has a heart, but it could have been much more … if it only had a brain.

This Is the End

OMG, it's the future...our careers going up in flames!

Grade: B -

Directors: Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen

Starring: Seth Rogen, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 1 hr. 47 min.

There’s a good, even ingenious movie floating around This Is the End. It’s not the promise of an apocalyptic end to the raunchy, gross-out comedy subgenre, although if I truly believed that was the metaphor writer-directors Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen were aiming for, I might laud the film as one of the year’s best.

No, the bulk of This Is the End is a repackaged rehash of the same ribald assortment of scatalogical/pharamacological gags that most of the lead actors, in varying combinations, have foisted before: Seth Rogen and James Franco in Pineapple Express; Rogen and Jonah Hill (plus Michael Cera and Christopher Mintz-Plasse) in Superbad; Rogen and Craig Robinson (plus Paul Rudd) in Knocked Up; Franco and Danny McBride in the atrocious Your Majesty; and so on.

The hook here is that all the actors are playing themselves, or in some cases variations of themselves under their real names. Jay Baruchel has flown into LAX to visit best bud Rogen (who has to run the gauntlet of prying paparazzi on his way through the terminal). A weekend of good weed, bad food and video games is interrupted when Rogen drags a reluctant Baruchel to a star-filled party at James Franco’s house.

The opening scenes, especially after action shifts to the house party, are the most titillating. The camera roams the room in Altman-esque fashion, eavesdropping on scripted conversations laced with hints of veracity. Jason Segel chats up Kevin Hart; Emma Watson and Mindy Kaling say hi; a lewd, coked-up Michael Cera smacks Rihanna’s behind; there’s a mini Superbad reunion. For his part, Baruchel loathes the Hollywood scene, preferring a jaunt to the corner grocery over one more minute in the company of Jonah Hill. This is what the entirety of This Is the End should have been: a comedy that skewers the artifice of celebrity and excess, where friendships are fake and/or fleeting.

But just as we’re settling in, well, a giant sinkhole opens up in Franco’s front yard and swallows up most of the partygoers. It’s only the start of a stroll through the Book of Revelations, where flames engulf the Malibu Hills, fire rains down from the sky, and a well-endowed (yes, that figures in as well) demon slaughters the survivors.

Rogen, Baruchel, Franco, Hill, Robinson and Danny McBride find themselves holed up inside Franco’s home. As they squabble over everything from food rations to sleeping arrangements to petty rivalries, the group’s petulance and narcissism outlast the reckoning outside. However, despite some uproariousness interludes, the audience eventually suffers in the same claustrophobic weariness as the housemates, especially when it comes the uncouth McBride. Even once the action finally ventures outdoors, the overarching life lesson of “Be Nice” isn’t particularly profound.

The parlor game here is guessing which on-screen personalities cut closest to the truth. Is Rogen really a self-loathing sellout? Is Franco a self-absorbed, neurotic gonzo? Is Jonah Hill a passive-aggressive phony? Is McBride a foul-mouthed lout (well, I’m pretty sure about that one)? We’re pretty sure Cera—the most outrageous playing himself against type since Neil Patrick Harris in Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle—isn’t a lascivious jerk, and that Watson doesn’t turn into an ax-wielding thief under pressure. But it’s fun to imagine.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice

Dumb and Dumbest

Grade: C –

Director: Jon Turteltaub

Starring: Nicolas Cage, Jay Baruchel, Alfred Molina, Teresa Palmer, and Toby Kebbell

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hour, 49 minutes

Nicholas Cage, Jerry Bruckheimer, and Jon Turteltaub reteam for more National Treasure-style gobbledygook in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, a kiddie action-fantasy flick beaten into immediate antiquity by a blur of stupefying, subpar FX and no less than five credited screenwriters.

Cage plays Balthazar, a master sorcerer once mentored by Merlin, locked in a 1,000-year race against the nefarious and natty Horvath (Alfred Molina) – his ex-best friend but now arch-nemesis – to locate mankind’s savior in the form of some made-up something called the “Prime Merlinian” before Horvath can release the spirit of the evil witch Morgana (Alice Krige) from her grimhold prison.

Balthazar’s prodigious protégé turns out to be Dave (Jay Baruchel), a college tech-head and another in a long line of movie geeks – most recently Baruchel himself in She’s Out of My League – who manage to woo a gorgeous girl who is, well, out of his league. Here, it’s Becky (Teresa Palmer), an NYU classmate and blond beauty who inexplicably takes as a shine to Dave’s newfound ability to foil muggers and his obsession with making music using plasma streams and Tesla coils in his deserted subway station-cum-basement. Yep, you read that right.

The dialogue is so vapid and the plot so joyless that even the otherwise gonzo sight of Cage wearing funny hats, shooting plasma balls, and riding art deco griffins isn’t enough to summon a pleasantly kitschy spell. Baruchel’s miscasting – voice, gait, mannerisms, everything – becomes apparent whenever Dave must don the hero’s cloak. Molina is the best part of a bad movie for the second time this summer (see also Prince of Persia).

The storyline was originally conceived by Cage (danger alert…) as a live-action homage to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice segment in Fantasia. Unfortunately, the only noticeable send-up of the 1940 Disney classic is when Dave conjures a roomful of dancing mops and brooms, a tonally out-of-place and nonsensical scene even in a movie with millennium-old wizards and fire-breathing dragons rampaging through Chinatown.

For a movie about magic, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice contains precious little of its own.

Neil Morris