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Hi, this is Dana Stephen Slate's movie critic here with a Slate's spoiler special podcast on Robocop, the new Jose Pagelio remake of the Paul Verhoeven classic from 1987.

So, joining me here in the Slate New York studio are Chris Wade, audio producer extraordinaire.

Hello, Dana.

And Forrest Wickman, who is a contributor to Slate, an editor, editor of the Browbeat Culture Blog. Am I getting this right?

Yeah, a writer, primarily for Browbeat.

All-around Slate Writer and Good Dude.

And so we all saw Robocop. You're welcome.

We all saw Robocop last night together. We tried not to talk about it too much afterwards.

And I know that you guys had strong feelings as well about the original.

So the way I want to structure our conversation is first react to the new movie, then maybe

we'll go back and talk a little bit about the Paul Verhoeven movie and about the act of

remaking cult classics and the obstacles in the way of people who try to do that.

All right. So just quickly, what did you guys think of the new Robocop? I thought it was not terrible. It has a lot of good stuff in it. I really enjoyed Michael Keaton and Jay Baruchel. But I felt like ultimately it couldn't really decide how seriously to take itself. It wasn't quite light enough, as the original often is, to really be fun fun and it wasn't quite smart enough to justify

all of its sort of darkness. So I wanted to have more fun or to find it more interesting

and instead I couldn't quite go with either of those. Yeah? What about you, Chris?

Nah. It didn't really, it doesn't really have anything to bring to the table. It's like an

indication at an action movie rather than anything either celebratory of its original or treading into uncharted territories.

It's just aggressively mediocre in like pretty much every quadrant that a movie can be.

Yeah, I would say it feels like a February action release, which is really sort of sad,

given that I think it does have some pretty good material to work with.

...