RoboCop (José Padilha, 2014)

Cop will eat itself. Once again, a reboot for no other purpose than having a safe product, and sod consumer goodwill; it's there to be exploited if they're undemanding enough to want nothing more than more of the same. Somehow, while Michael Keaton and Samuel L. Jackson clearly don't have ethical compunctions about getting their paycheque for this kind of thing, you expected better of Gary Oldman. It's largely irrelevant that this takes a slightly different tack to the original, with more politics and the hero's family in on what's happened from the start: these things can only be justified by improving on the source, and the satire here is toothless in comparison, seeming to be attempted only tokenistically, but so too are the generic teched-up action scenes, which really is beyond the pale.

3/10