The Movie Review this week looks at Robocop, director Jose Padilha's remake of a 1987 classic. It is currently competing with "The Hobbit: Desolation of Smaug" for the favor of the Chinese audience. Guess which one is the winner? Luo Laiming has more!

It's safe to say, Robocop will not make much of a dent in Chinese film market. Not because it faces strong competition against the new Hobbit film, but rather because it has its own disadvantages.

Firstly, the original 1987 film of the same name is not very well known in China. Despite its one-time popularity which spawned a lackluster franchise, all I could vaguely recall is an animated TV series. There are some science-fiction fans who remember Paul Verhoeven's movie as a must-see classic, but generally speaking few would walk into the cinema knowing they'll be seeing a remake.

Even for those looking forward to watching a modern interpretation of the story, there are still a few things that will disappoint viewers, but we'll come to that later.

To do justice to the director Jose Padilha, we need to first acknowledge his efforts to appeal to viewers with modern tastes. I don't think the new generation of moviegoers could appreciate the stiff action genre of the last century. I don't think the styles of Sylvester Stallone or Arnold Schwarzenegger are able to sell as they once did. If they were a few decades younger, they would abandon their "stand-still-and-shoot" style quicker than you can say Jack Robinson.

So the 2014 entry is an improvement on the Verhoeven original. The story is propelled by swift action and deft editing. And modern CGI techniques offer rewarding effects, including videogame-like gunfights and perhaps a somewhat discomforting exhibition of brain surgery.

On the other side of editing is a barely complete story. The 1987 classic, according to Wikipedia, includes themes regarding the media, gentrification, corruption, authoritarianism, dystopia and many others. But in the remake, two words are enough to summarize the whole piece: shooting sprees. Robocop has a wife and a son, but no screen time is devoted to explaining how they get used to a family member made of steel. The scientist played by Gary Oldman tampered with Robocop's brain to make him, or it, lose human sentiment. There could well be some extra storylines on the side to enrich the whole set. But the director chose to ignore them, and instead decided that the viewers needed more gunfights.

A human-robot sci-fi film is always an appetizer for the more thoughtful of filmgoers. But with "Robocop", each time you think "Wait a minute, that's an interesting idea", the story fails to linger and instead carries you forward to a noisy showdown of 50 caliber bullets.

The movie's primary target is the brainy sci-fi lovers, but it has not done a great job to entertainment them.