10 Recent Movie Remakes That You Already Forgot Existed

The Original: The genius of Paul Verhoeven's RoboCop is that it is both a relentlessly entertaining sci-fi action movie, and a brilliant satire. Rarely do movies work as both these things, but Verhoeven - who pulled off the same feat with his later film Starship Troopers, too - delivers an ultra-violent rollercoaster ride that doubles as a critique on everything from capitalism to the media. We're talking about a movie whose main character happens to be half-robot, half-cop, people. Bravo!

The Forgotten Remake: The remake of RoboCop should have been a big deal, given that it stars Gary Oldman and Sam Jackson, but the moment audiences got wind that it wasn't good or bad, but somewhere in-between, they lost interest.

RoboCop 2014 tried to be both an actioner and a satire in the same vein as its predecessor, but it failed to commit fully to either approach, resulting in a scattershot affair with no clear reason to exist. Clearly intended as the start of a new franchise, we've heard nothing since, and that's not surprising at all.

So RoboCop has not gone down as a colossal failure, nor a worthwhile effort: it lingers in limbo, where it fails to register in your memory banks on account of the fact that there's nothing here that warrants a second viewing; bland and synthetic.