RoboCop

Some dudes are really mad that this 1987 robot cop movie has been remade, as if a Paul Verhoven film is a monument of satire and nuance, but they must be real mad because they didn’t do that nerd thing of going to see it anyway, and Robocop totally tanked. Anyway, it’s 2028 in Detroit—though the movie doesn’t really specify so it’s possible that it’s sharing world space with Spike Jonze’s Her, which is a bizarro world companion piece; the future is just the worst—and cop Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman, Holder on The Killing, who knows from tortured police personnel) has just been blown up by a drug dealer. Luckily for him Michael Keaton wants to put a man in a robot so the American people will accept the policing machines he’s been selling to war efforts in Afghanistan et al. You can guess how it goes. Not funny enough and video-game violent, Robocop is more like a fanfic than a movie. —Tara Thorne