Joel Kinnaman is an actor who seems to be perpetually on the cusp, but hasn’t quite broken through just yet. He’s got another shot this coming weekend in "Run All Night" opposite Liam Neeson, and he’s bagged a key role in "Suicide Squad" coming next year. But before either of those films, Kinnaman had another shot at stardom in last year’s ill-advised "RoboCop" remake and he’s pretty clear about why it didn’t work.
"I thought that Jose Padilha had a really interesting vision for that. But, then, at the same time, when doing these kind of comic book, these beloved characters, you also have to be really aware of what about it the fans love so much. And you have to understand that and sort of build your new idea on that," he told Uproxx.
"What we did wrong on ‘RoboCop,’ we just did something new and didn’t really take into account what the fans really loved about the original," he continued. "I think that we should have gone and found more humor and more charm in it. And it’s tricky doing a movie like ‘RoboCop’ at PG-13. Maybe we shouldn’t have changed the suit and we should have done it rated R and do it with a smaller budget — I think people would have given it a much bigger chance. But, with all that said, as a film, I’m really proud of it. I think it’s a really good movie that has really interesting concepts."
But perhaps the other reason it didn’t work is that Paul Verhoeven‘s original is completely fine, as we outlined in our feature, 10 Reasons Why The Original ‘RoboCop’ Can’t Be Beaten By The Remake. However, sometimes an actor and director just won’t mesh, and while many thespians have proclaimed their love of Terrence Malick‘s freewheeling, unscripted, in-the-moment shooting style, Kinnaman wasn’t keen on the making of "Knight Of Cups." He reveals he’s been snipped from the movie, but he’s not too broken up about it.
"I didn’t feel too comfortable," he said. "He films in a very different way. He has a very detached way of shooting his films where you don’t feel very involved. I guess some people like it and some people like it less." You can probably figure which side Kinnaman is on.
"Run All Night" opens on Friday.
I said it before but I\’ll do so again: the RoboCop remake was not bad. It also didn\’t even come close to touching the satire showcased in the original and maybe it was slightly lesser because of that but when you factor in the different climates during the times the two films were made, just shoehorning in that same satirical bent seen in the original onto the remake would\’ve been a horrendously stupid move. I don\’t see it as them "dumbing it down" for their audience more as they opted not to crap all over their audiences by churning out another "exactly the same" remake from the grand exalted Remake Factory. If they could\’ve gotten a sequel off the ground, exploring how blurred the lines are between Alex Murphy and humanity at large would\’ve been interesting to see.
Robocop made just shy of $245m worldwide. Not a huge success, but not a \’failure\’ so to speak. Jupiter Ascending (despite its opening in China) is a \’failure\’. Robocop must have had at least washed its face financially. On the creative side, it\’s Robocop for f*ck\’s sake. What do you want, Citizen Kane?
Robocop was bad because it had nothing interesting to say, it was unfocused and sanitised. They completely failed to say anything new (and didn\’t even repeat what the original said). While I didn\’t think Robocop should have been remade, there is a lot it could have been about. We live in a world in which privatisation won, in which drones and body augmentations are increasingly a part of every day life, in which the virtual and reality are increasingly meshed, either directly with things like Google Glass and Oculus Rift or indirectly through our dependence on portable computers and social media. We\’re also in a world in which media and it\’s influence on us has completely changed, we are all globalised mass-connected cyborgs anyway, \’Robocop\’ is merely our logical conclusion. But the movie didn\’t have a single thought on any of this, the most it attempted were some extremely weak arguments about free will, ultimately resolving in a cliché about the soul being stronger than a computer (ugh).