10 Changes That Made RoboCop 2014 Vastly Inferior To The Original

9. Playing It Straight

Leading on from the last point, then, RoboCop 2014 clearly wants to have its cake and eat it too, in the sense that the movie tries so desperately to re-imagine the world of RoboCop in a "serious" manner, despite the fact that it also periodically tries to remind you that it's a satire, too (if that's what you want). The vastly superior remake of Dredd - written by Alex Garland - nailed the kind of tone that RoboCop should've opted for: a satire in its own right, it had the guts to be tongue in cheek, too, and never felt like it was trying to sell you a "serious" story. So when we have Alex Murphy's wife, Clara, running around and injecting the movie with periodical scenes of attempted emotional weight, the movie struggles to justify their existence because what we're watching - at the end of the day - is a movie about a man who has been transformed into a cyborg. The year is set as 2028, and it doesn't seem feasible that this might be our world at all. The supporting cast is largely filled with characters who don't know realise they should be in a satire, whereas the cast of the original 1987 movie - hammy and chewing the scenery - clearly did.