Robocop (2014)

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 Robocop is a timeless, satirical classic that really didn't need to be remade.

But Hollywood decided to anyway. Yet, instead of cranking all the dials up to 11 and going completely over-the-top, the filmmakers instead decided to dial it back to five, with a 12 Certificate in the UK, thus neutering the concept's dark, Grand Guignol, humour.

It's 2028 and America's largest manufacturer of military robots, Omnicorp, is forbidden by law from deploying its machines on the streets of America. Therefore it hits upon a canny workaround by transforming bomb victim Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman), a zealous police detective, into a part-human, part-machine cyborg aka Robocop.

The first half of this two-hour movie, directed by José Padilha and written by Joshua Zetume, concerns itself with Murphy's backstory and metamorphosis into Robocop, shepherded by scientist Dr Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) and head of Omnicorp Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton).

The latter part of the film is Murphy taking his crimefighting skills to the streets and gradually overcoming his programming to investigate his own 'murder' and the corruption of Omnicorp.

It's really this second half of the plot where things get messy, bordering on nonsensical, but - despite the feeling of a lot of missed opportunities - this latest iteration of Robocop is still a pretty decent action movie. If nothing else, it's certainly a better Judge Dredd film than Dredd.

Unfortunately, it's totally devoid of the camp charm and charismatic villains that the original '80s Robocop possessed in spades, and will always come up short in comparison. It pretends to be a smart, savvy retelling but actually rings hollow if you stop and think about it for too long (which isn't recommended).

Robocop (2014) also makes the massive mistake - as these unwanted remakes always seem to do - of referencing the original (e.g. "I'll buy that for a dollar" and "dead or alive, you're coming with me"), but doing it really clumsily and only succeeding in reminding us of just how well those catchphrases worked first time around.