Rebootcop?? Apparently the remake of Robocop isn't dead yet

While it isn't the best film (it doesn't even rank on my top ten for sci-fi flicks) 1987's RoboCop will always have a special place in my heart because it was the first rated R film I ever saw.* Also how can you beat the tag line? "Part man. Part machine. All cop." Classic!

The idea of a remake (reboot? re-imagining? who the f knows anymore?) keeps getting kicked around, as it has for the last two years. I've been hoping that the whole thing would just die out. Sadly this is not the case.

"The Hollywood Reporter" reports that MGM just hired Gran Torino scribe Nick Schenk to rework the Robocop screenplay. This is about the third person who has had to "rework" this script. That should tell you something. The fact that MGM hired Schenk doesn't improve my confidence either. I thought Gran Torino was an incredibly overrated film and I don't understand why it received all the accolades it did.

Director Jose Padilha has his own vision of what he wants the film to be:

"‘RoboCop’ the first movie was fantastic,” he told us. “But even if there was no movie, the concept of ‘RoboCop’ is brilliant, first because it lends itself to a lot of social criticism, but also because it poses a question, ‘When do you lose you humanity?’ The way it does that is by replacing body parts with machine parts, and that’s very smart because guess what? It’s going to happen!” “I have my take on it,” he continued, “And I can tell you this: In the first ‘RoboCop’ when Alex Murphy is shot, gunned down, then you see some hospitals and stuff and then you cut to him as RoboCop. My movie is between those two cuts. How do you make RoboCop? How do you slowly bring a guy to be a robot? How do you actually take humanity out of someone and how do you program a brain, so to speak, and how does that affect an individual?”

So he wants to combine RoboCop with Sophie's Choice? While I appreciate the sentiment and that Padilha wants to examine the humanity issue--it's freakin' RoboCop! I don't know about you but I have zero interest in seeing a two hour film that explores the time building Robocop. If you're going to reboot this film at least keep it close to the original source material. I want to see this film made about as much as I want to see Tom Brady win another Superbowl this Sunday, which is to say not at all. MGM do the right thing here and throw this reboot on the trash heap.

*If anybody tells you that I covered my eyes when I watched the part where the dude melts at the end of the movie--they're lying.