Amazon just handed the RoboCop badge to Dan Stevens, and for once the consensus is… positive? Prime Video’s eight-episode series has been cooking at Amazon MGM ever since they swallowed the MGM vault, and now Stevens will play Alex Murphy, the murdered Detroit cop bolted back together into one very polite killing machine. He announced it himself in a little video, looking thrilled about it. Good. So are we.
Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop (1987) is still the gold standard of trash satire, a movie that blow a hole in the guts of privatised violence and corporate rot; a squib-drenched action movie with a pitch black sense of humour. RoboCop 2 (1990) gets a bad rap it does not deserve, honestly. It’s meaner and messier, sure, but Phil Tippett’s stop-motion Cain is jaw-dropping model work, and the pulp sensibility and gags are still strong. RoboCop 3 (1993) was PG-13, toy-friendly, with all the teeth pulled, and extremely dull.
In other media, Marvel ran a RoboCop ongoing for 23 issues (1990–92), Alan Grant then Simon Furman writing, Lee Sullivan drawing, and Furman honestly did more with Murphy’s grief and OCP’s people-into-RoboCops factories than the third movie managed. It got so gloriously silly with hover-bikes that readers wrote in to complain it wasn’t near-future enough, and Marvel sheepishly grounded the flying gangs. Deep-cut bonus: OCP even oozed out of its own franchise to show up as a polluting corporation in the background of Excalibur, looming over Captain Britain and pals. And the Ocean tie-in game absolutely slapped, too.
That leaves the 2014 remake, which was… mediocre at best. Somebody clearly left the comedy and satire out of the equation. It’s the ghost hanging over every reboot announcement, leaving everybody suspicious.
But if anything was going to give us a jolt of optimism, it was Dan Stevens. He’s the dark visor in The Guest running on pure smiling menace. He’s the unhinged resort creep in Cuckoo, the vampire-ballerina headache in Abigail, the human antenna losing his mind in Legion. He’ll do oddball interiority through six layers of prosthetic, which is exactly the trick a guy stuck in a metal suit talking through a voice-box has to pull off. Peter Weller made stillness in that costume an art form. Stevens is the rare actor who takes a physical straitjacket and treats it like a present.
The crew is reassuring too. James Wan is producing through Blumhouse Atomic Monster, Peter Ocko is the showrunner, and, crucially, original screenwriters Ed Neumeier and Michael Miner are on as executive producers – good, because RoboCop only works when the people making it get the joke.
Nothing’s shot yet and reboot promises are worth roughly nothing, we know. But the vibes are good, and the goodwill is real. It’s all riding on Stevens, but dead or alive, we’re in.
Source: Deadline.