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Reviews
RoboCop (2014)
It stinks
I've seen many people call this movie "smart". It is absolutely not. The writing in this movie is some of the dumbest I have ever seen. One golden exchange between the doctor and his assistant goes: His dopamine levels are coming back to normal! How is that even possible? I haven't the faintest idea... Other memorably stupid details in the film include RoboCop's system referring to an intoxicated suspect as "totally stoned" or a scene where RoboCop scans a suspect who is then listed as "cooperative, non-threat" but RoboCop being the edgy badass he is written as in this film shoots him dead anyway. Even without comparing it to the original, this movie fails on almost every level. The acting is bad for the most part, especially from the leads Joel Kinnaman and Abbie Cornish. The only redeemable performances are from Gary Oldman, Jackie Earle Haley and Samuel Jackson. The writing is very inconsistent and the plot is sloppy as a result of a lack of focus. It almost feels like they tried to have too many plot lines and ideas and couldn't be cut into a concise two hour plot. For example, the first scene is almost ten minutes and has a setting and mood that is unlike the rest of the film, but it serves no purpose other than to show that robots are used in other countries but are not legal in America, which is unnecessary because they tell you that twenty more times over the course of the film. Almost the first entire half of the film is "Murphy was injured, is rebuilt as RoboCop, must train", except this fails because they spend so much time on the melodrama to characterize RoboCop, but it's so poorly written that you cannot care about the character. Other grievances I had with the film do relate to the fact that it's a remake, because that lends itself to comparison. In the original, Murphy is blown apart by a firing squad of gangsters before he is shot in the head. As a result, the only thing saving his life was the surgery turning him into RoboCop. In the remake, he is injured by a car bomb. The doctor says "He has fourth degree burns on 80% of his body, it is unlikely he will survive" despite the fact that the image they show of Murphy is him missing a leg but certainly doesn't have 80% of his body covered in burns and doesn't even look in danger of death. This is compounded by the fact that after the surgery, all that is left of his body is his head and lungs. How did he go from missing a leg to missing his entire body? Did the doctors cut him apart? It makes absolutely no sense. Also, it tries to be like the original in continuously asking "Is he machine or man?" but unlike the original where it is ambiguous if RoboCop retained his personality, in the remake Alex never loses his identity or his memories. He is always himself in the film, except for one point halfway through where they lower his dopamine levels and that turns him into an emotionless robot. This is incredibly stupid because dopamine is the drug in your body that influences emotions, but lowering dopamine in the body would not remove his personality. Then he gets his personality back when his body synthesizes more dopamine, which hilariously perplexes the doctors. Another large issue I had is that the subplot where RoboCop tries to find who blew him up feels incredibly forced, as they were clearly trying to include it due to its importance in the plot of the original. Also, there is no reason given to why they blew him up other than one line that I believe said "He can't be bought off like the other cops" but I'm not sure because it was very quick and it's never brought up again. There is no impact to him finding the people who blew him up because it's a subplot with little and poor build up and rather than being intertwined with the main plot like the original, it is tacked on and irrelevant to the over-arcing story. I could go on for hours about everything this movie did wrong, but in short, it fails to be engaging and exciting like an action movie should and it fails to create likable and sympathetic characters like a good story should. I mention those because it clearly spends a lot of time trying to make RoboCop sympathetic and it fails miserably, and it was marketed as an action flick but the action is forgettable and makes up not even fifteen minutes of the two hour movie. One of the worst movies I have ever seen.
Gacy (2003)
Low Budget Mess 'MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS'
I wasn't expecting much going into this film. It was direct-to-VHS, so i figured it would be bad. It lived up to that. The writing is the main problem in this movie. Sometimes the scenes are set up to be akin to a horror movie, while others are written like a drama. The writing is so bad it's like a joke. In one scene, a man goes to Gacy's house and tells Gacy's elderly mother that her son is a serial rapist. Her response to the man is "You son of a b***h!" and slams the door. It was hilarious for all the wrong reasons. In another scene, two undercover cops go to Gacy's house. One of them asks Gacy, "We'd like to look around, if you don't mind," in what is either a terrible Canadian accent or a parody of a terrible Canadian accent. Gacy's response is "do you have a warrant," followed by "F**k off... d*****bags." It qualifies to be one of the worst lines in movie history. The acting for the most part is horrible. Gacy's wife in particular is a terrible actress in this film, but that goes for most of the acting. I could tell that Mark Holton was trying to act good in this, but it was impossible with the shitty, laughable script. The story is poorly structured with events not being tied together in any significant way. Gacy kills a boy, the cops look for the boy, then they forget about it until he kills someone else. Most of the movie is just isolated events. It doesn't even really show how the cops know he's the killer. I guess at one point they decide to assume he's the killer based on evidence we aren't shown they have. There is no character development but i wasn't expecting any. The first scene is Gacy being slapped by his father when he was a kid, and that is literally the only back story we get for Gacy, so it isn't even explained how that turned him into a killer. This movie could have been good if it was structured like a documentary or if the writing was good, but instead we get this. This movie might be worth a rent/view on the internet if you look at it as a B movie, even then it's not a good one. The only good part about it are the occasional "so bad it's funny" line or in one scene, Gacy hires an exterminator played by Carl from Billy Madison, so I thought that was cool. Still, if you want the real Gacy story, watch a documentary about it on Youtube. 2 out of 10