This movie is so cheap and shallow that it's not even funny. I found out the reason why this movie bombed so badly. It wasn't entertaining or even well made. It's main character is a horrible killing machine with no distinct character traits even. Cheap South African,(And I don't mean disrespect to South African made movies, District 9 is pretty good and well budgeted, as is Chappie) Cannon Like production of an Action movie reminded me of Superman IV nearly. Or one of those other 21st Century Comic Book movies like Captain America from 1990. Obviously the budget was only limited to a few sfx shots of the city that might as well be stolen from Blade Runner. Our hero is no hero, he's a thug and a killer with no sympathy or humanity.
It's version of Dredd is Robocop without any of the humanity or background. We are forced to have to sympathize with his partner Anderson who is merely there for titillation and half hearted attempts at humanity. Other wise you get Lena Headey's bored acting, she learned nothing from being equally terrible on Game of Thrones. She reads lines with no energy and with no real characterization but hey evil. The script was written by an Academy Award Winning writer, could have fooled me. It seems written by a teenager in puberty who just learned the art of cussing and who maybe has anger management issues. Our bad guys are even more faceless than the ones in Assault on Precinct 13 and that movie is a freaking masterpiece.
It's just so mind boggling how this movie gets praise. It seems more just a movie to rub people's faces in unpleasant violence and shallow, wannabe-cool dialogue. Maybe Garland thinks himself Tarantino. I know The Raid had violence in it, but even it wasn't as laughably bad as this movie. And it's characters didn't need to say shallow, wannabe cool dialogue. They didn't feel the need to dress like cos players taking a break from comic-con. People may think that Evans stole from the script of Dredd. Quite frankly I don't believe this. Evans took an old story device and used it as his own. Same as Dredd did, but The Raid actually made use of it and wasn't really reaching for all this grand, wannabe epic, cool BS. And our main characters in that weren't psychotic killers or thugs with Nazi regalia on.
And please, Stallone did more with this material in 96 minutes than this movie could even dream of doing. The writers of the comics just need to get over the precious changes he made. So what about the Helmet. What was that helmet? Important? Not really, it's not like it wasn't featured in the movie. And to further the Robocop allusions, Robocop took off his mask during the last part of his movie to symbolize his humanity the same way Stallone does. Clearly this movie seems not to care about this symbolism. It's hero is a guy who has lost his humanity and shows few hints that we care not to know about in a sequel.
In short, this movie is terrible, cheap looking, boring with long scenes of slowmo and drug inhaling. Violence and death is glorified even worse than most movies and I can usually stand some glorification of violence. Not Recommended.
PS. Slowmo is one of the lamest drug excuses for doing fancy slow motion shots in your movie I have ever seen. It's stupid, why the heck did you need a drug in the movie to explain why scenes were in slow motion, writer? Just have slow motion in your movie, it doesn't need a drug to explain it being there, it just seems like a excuse for you to have it. And a lame plot device. You couldn't have come up with some special future drug that was like a mixture of heroin,ectasy crack, cocaine, weed or something? No, you had to create something that I'm surprised the actors and actresses could say with a straight face!
