Movie of the Week: I Frankenstein

Moderate spoilers ahead.

This is every bit as cliched as you might expect but - hey it was a slow week and we get the twofers on a Wednesday.

OK, it's not all bad. I mean, we didn't walk out or anything - which means it scores higher than Tron 2. Aaron Eckhart majkes reasonably good Adam - Frankenstein's monster still alive in the present day, but sad to say Bill Nighy seems to dial in his performance from a distance. Scenery-chewing villainy is not really his style.

My lack of comic book savvy meant I hadn't realised this was a comic book movie, but no matter if it's a movie it should be able to stand on its own anyway. Anyhow, the guardians of good are the Gargoyle Order, standing against Naberius who is trying to have legions of demons ascend to be reborn into (currently dead and therefire soulless) human bodies if only he can figure out how Frankenstein made Adam in the first place.

Throw in a pretty human scientist (female, of clourse) and the scene is set for Adam to deside which side he's on.

Yeah, right, I guessed the ending, too.

But it was a wet Wednesday afternoon, so what else were we going to do with a couple of hours?

Movie of the Week: Robocop

I sometimes feel as though the strapline for my Movie of the Week posts should be: Seeing films so you don't have to.

This week it was Robocop on the Wednesday afternoon 'twofers'.

I guess if you don't remember the original, this wasn't so bad - though it felt about half an hour too long - but... (You knew there was going to be a but, didn't you?) this Robocop lost some of its mystique of the original because you were never in any doubt that Alex Murphy, played by Joel Kinnaman, was aware of who he was and who he had been before being turned into a robot with a human brain and face. With Peter Weller's 1987 Robocop, you really didn't know how much of the man was still in there and that was the point of the movie.

OK, backtrack... Set in the a near future dystopian Detroit, Omnicorp has ambitions to put robotic cops into every city in the US. Already in use in the military, law enforcement is a tantalising and lucrative market but the American public won't go for it, until Omnicorp boss, Raymond Sellars (an almost unrecognisable Michel Keaton) figures out how to make a robot with a conscience, courtesy of Doc Norton, Gary Oldman (excellent as usual) and fastens on recently injured cop, Alex, as his test subject.

This film asks the big question about drone soldiers, and is fairly heavy handed about it, courtesy of Samuel L Jackson's caracature turn as a super-right-wing broadcaster wholly in favour of the machine, whereas the original 1987 Robocop asked the question is the man inside the machine a man or a machine? (And kept you guessing for much of the movie.)

There were bits in the original that were genuinely scary but I think I have largely become desensitised to the shoot-em-up special effects so common in SF and action movies these days. Loud, yes; scary, no. I did find some of the early scenes (footage of robot drones deployed in a future Afghanistan) genuinely nasty, however. One plus point: though there were some shots of Robocop speeding through the streets on his mo'bike at least there was no interminable car chase.

If anyone remembers the satisfying (airpunch) ending of the original movie when the 'Old Man' makes it possible for Robocop to circumvent his hidden programming - that doesn't happen in this movie, but it does get there in the end.

One thing I found quite worrying, however, was the number of unaccompanied children obviously under 12 in this 12A movie.(Half term week.) Bad form, Cineworld. Movies have age ratings for a reason. Still, kudos to the kids, they were all well behaved.