RoboCop Gets In Some Target Practice In New Clip

By Nick Venable | Published

This article is more than 2 years old


I believe we can now officially refer to the marketing campaign for José Padilha’s RoboCop as a “blitz,” as I can’t seem to get online, watch TV, or step through the front doors of OmniCorp without seeing a trailer, image, or poster for the reboot. A new clip has surfaced, and it’s been loaded into a gun and blasted out all over the Internet for everyone to see. And I have to ask: was anyone else experiencing the same problem with suspension of disbelief?

This is almost entirely trivial, sure, but I’ve been trying to wrap my mind around this movie in a way that doesn’t involve me constantly making comparisons to Paul Verhoeven’s original film. And while it’s almost impossible to do without actually sitting through the whole feature myself, I thought maybe watching this clip would do it for me.

The clip features Alex “Cop of Robo” Murphy going through a field test inside of an abandoned building, where he is allowed to test out his guns and reflexes on a small platoon of EM-208 robot authorities, as well as Jackie Earle Haley’s character Mattox. It’s obviously an early scene, as Murphy is coming into his own as the morally bound half-machine, and it’s filled with enough gunplay and flashy camera movement to warrant its existence.

Yet all that’s echoing in my head is Murphy’s lifeless line “I’ve been through a lot,” as the out-of-place guitar lick hits. And then all I started thinking about is, “How would the U.S. population ever agree to allow billions of dollars to go into the development of robot cops if some of them are used as bait in situations like this, with RoboCop destroying the shit out of everything?” I’m not saying the movie itself is responsible for me thinking these inane thoughts, but I’m saying it’ll have to work pretty hard to get these already-formed thoughts out of my head. Oh, the tragic life of a sci-fi fan.

While I really enjoyed the fake CES presentation, it appears I’m still not won over by anything that actually deals with the film itself. It’s very possible I could be going through Michael Keaton, Gary Oldman, and Samuel L. Jackson withdrawals, since none of them show up in this clip at all.

Set in the year 2028, RoboCop will follow the loving husband Murphy after he gets blown up and turned into the epitome of law enforcement, thanks to the mega-contractor monopoly OmniCorp. Not only will he have to battle the bad guys taking over Detroit, but also the ones that made him. And maybe also himself. Find out how it goes when the film takes aim at theaters on February 12.