When I started out with FTW Week, it was genuinely because I stumbled upon Movie Central and discovered that there was a whole host of Asylum movies on there that I could cover for the blog and I definitely wanted to work that into a regular monthly thing. And since they don't just host Asylum stuff, it had to be called something else, so I settled on FTW meaning Free To Watch, as they are - essentially free to watch, without breaking some random copyright law. Since then it has brought to the table some surprising sleeper hits but also some of the most lousy garbage I've ever watched, and tonight's movie is one that I've sort of been saving but one that I've looked at a handful of times, saving mostly because I genuinely think this is going to be one of the good ones. Android Cop - another Asylum production and is a semi-mockbuster of the 2014 reboot of Robocop but, on first impressions, is less obvious with it's copycat-ness than Asylum movies are renowned for being, and general reception seems to be that this is actually quite decent so, tonight, let's actually give it a chance!
It's the year 2045, and Sergeant Hammond (Michael Jai White) finds himself paired with the cutting edge of future autonomous law enforcement a, "Android Cop" if you will, Andy (Randy Wayne), and he is less than enthused about the opportunity... but committed to prove that Android Cops can't replace the real thing, Hammond agrees to the proposal. When one of their first cases; find the missing "telepresence" (basically an android controlled by person's brain whilst they're still alive) of the Mayor's daughter; Helen Jacobs (Larissa Vereza) gets even more complicated when they discover the telepresence doesn't know it's an android and believes it's still human, Hammond and Andy initially pay a visit to interrogate a man who traffics people in and out of the "Zone" - an area of heavy radioactive contamination but a haven for illegal activity. But when their interrogation methods clash, Hammond and Andy end up fighting resulting in Andy throwing Hammond out of a window, but that... seemingly goes nowhere because in the next scene they are immediately co-operative with each other again... ok... but it does lead to them discovering Helen is located in Zone 12 when Andy tracks a call made to Helen from the people trafficker. Meanwhile back at the Station, Sergeant Jones (Kadeem Hardison) makes a mysterious phone call alerting someone that Hammond and Andy will be in the zone... and after a meeting with Mayor Jacobs (Charles S. Dutton) he reveals that the whole operation is designed to lead to the criminal gangs in the Zone being destroyed, by forcing Hammond into an un-survivable situation and in the event of his death: provide justification for the Police to invade the zone and take them all down. After travelling to the Zone, Hammond and Andy meet up with Helen after she saves them from a bomb underneath their car, and Helen leads them to a sanctuary where they discover the Zone isn't radioactive after all but that the people are being poisoned as part of some slightly convoluted scheme to drive up land value in the rest of Los Angeles. The principal benefactor being; Mayor Jacobs... but as they are leaving the sanctuary they are ambushed by a rival gang, the ensuing gunfight proving enough for Sgt. Jones to scramble his men to Zone 12. Deciding that high ground is their best bet of making an extraction, Hammond, Andy and Helen fight to the top of an apartment block but when Helen is injured she realises she is an android, and not human but seems to come to terms with it pretty quickly revealing she had her suspicions from the beginning. Arriving on the scene, Sgt. Jones and his team of officers surround the trio and suspecting something is wrong Andy orders Hammond and Helen to flee the scene. As Jones and Andy face off, Jones orders HQ to initiate a manual override of the Android Cop, but it's not Andy who powers down... it's Hammond! As the real Hammond wrestles for control with HQ over... well himself... he suddenly begins to have a realisation that he too is a telepresence and like Helen he wasn't made aware. However resisting control, he manages to fight the order to execute Helen and as a gunfight between Jones's team and Andy breaks out, Helen manages to carry Hammond to safety as Andy escapes. Commandeering a vehicle they begin to escape from the Zone as Jones makes a call to the Police Security guarding Hammond's comatose body... Informing Hammond that both himself and Helen have been disconnected from life support, the trio race to... the media centre offices I think, deciding to sacrifice himself so that Helen can tell her story, Hammond literally drives the car into the building and Helen races off to tell the media everything. Andy bursts into the hospital and restores Helen's life support just as the movie pans to a comatose Hammond flatlining. Meanwhile back at the hospital, Mayor Jacobs bursts in and cries that Helen had signed a "Do Not Resuscitate" order and that her life support should be switched off, however when it is Helen instead regains consciousness and it's revealed that she was kept sedated the whole time. Discovering his whole scheme has been blown open as the police burst in to arrest him, the Mayor instead chooses to shoot himself in the head dying instantly and in the closing scene we discover Hammond is now 100% android but has retained the personality and emotion of his telepresence...
Oh boy. I thought this was supposed to be one of the good ones? It was uh... not good. No. But it honestly managed to retain some positives and to the movies credit I genuinely didn't see the swerve with Hammond being an android too coming, so that was clever, granted but otherwise there was a lot of this that was just generally below average and at times, very below average that really dragged this movie down to a underperformer.
Let's mix things up a bit and start with the bad points first instead! A good 2/3rds of this movie was shot, I think, handheld. By somebody seriously wired on caffeine, because there was a very heavy degree of shaky camera work going on. I know it's sometimes a technique Directors pull to make it feel like you're an observer and you're really dialled into the action, but it was starting to make me feel a little bit motion sick. Genuinely. It was that bad. As if the person filming the shot was sitting on a rodeo bull trying their hardest to keep the camera trained on one central point! Other moments in the film were shot perfectly, even some quite impressively but a whole bunch of the movie was shot this way and not only did it feel amateurish but at times it got uncomfortable to watch.
Secondly; the acting was pretty hammy here. Michael Jai White was not bad, but he was the angry, arrogant cop persona and not much depth beyond that and at times he was really overacting in the action hero role. Randy Wayne was vanilla but I guess playing an emotionless android he was supposed to be, so he either did really well or really poorly depending by which measurement you want to go with I guess? Everybody else was overacting just that little bit too much that it got a bit cringe at times, and nobody was really impressing me that much.
Thirdly, whilst the storyline was decent enough, the plot development got a little bit convoluted, and this is something I've found before with Asylum films. They could have dialled back on the script a bit and they always seem to go 2 or 3 steps beyond when a movie could reach its natural conclusion. You sort of get action fatigue with it, because it becomes a race from the previous plot development point to the next and it almost gets a bit exhausting. Instead of overcomplicating the plot if they had kept it more simple but focussed more on the action it might have been more beneficial for the movie, and I know why they do it; to pull on the movie run length, but it's a real plague of low budget movies and it hurts them more than it improves them.
Those major 3 Achilles heels aside there was parts of the movie that were genuinely impressive, when the camera wasn't shaking like a house of cards built on a bowl of jelly, there was some actually impressive cinematography work going on and some really decent scene framing. The special effects whilst at times obviously low budget, I felt, were mostly pretty decent throughout and it's clear that despite the lack of resources some real attention to detail was put it in to make it work as best as possible, and as aforementioned I honestly didn't predict that plot twist so marks for story writing there, and the whole story in general actually did enough to distance itself from 2014 Robocop and deliver a narrative that was, well mostly, original and interesting.
However the painfully low budget filmmaking was so blatantly obvious here with the level of acting, the on-the-fly camerawork and the pacing of the plot that it really brought down what were some impressive other elements. And although this was interesting enough that I found myself mostly captured by the movie it was really difficult to escape the fact that you were watching a low budget movie. There was a lot of cringe, a lot of over-the-top, un-necessarily dramatic dialogue going on, delivered by some fairly unconvincing acting and it mostly boiled down to this just not being a very good movie. Which is a bit of a shame because I think Michael Jai White could probably work with more, but here, left to rely on his own devices he just wasn't enough to rescue the movie. It's a 1 out of 5.
