The year is 2028 and a multinational corporation OmniCorp is at the centre point of advanced robot technology. Their battle robots have been used by the military in the overseas conflicts for some time now - and it made OmniCorp and its CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) rich beyond imagination. However, when OmniCorp wants to expand the business by selling their robots for use in the civilian law enforcement at the home front, this is met with stiff opposition from the public. The U.S. Senate, swayed by the public opinion, comes up with the Dreyfus Act - a law forbidding the use of armed robots on US soil.

Sellars and his team desperately try to come up with some PR spin to change the public opinion, and at last come up with a cunning ploy to sell their vision of machines in law enforcement to the general public. They realise that the root cause of public distrust in OmniCorp’s robots is their non-human nature and decide to give their product a human face.

To this end, Sellars instructs his chief scientist Dr. Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) to find the right candidate for his plan. An opportunity soon comes in the form of Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) - a good cop, husband and father who is critically injured in the line of duty. Using a robotic body and software from their line of military robots and the latest breakthroughs in the brain-computer interface, OmniCorp builds a perfect cybernetic police officer – a law enforcer with the reaction times of a machine but appearances and emotions of a human being.

While uploading the whole police database, including footage from all CCTV cameras in Detroit, into Murphy’s brain, he is emotionally overwhelmed and has a major seizure. So that he doesn’t ruin the impending public press conference, Dr. Norton alters Murphy’s brain chemistry, lowering his dopamine levels until he no longer displays any emotions. Murphy attends the press conference, where he passes by his waiting wife and son - completely ignoring them, but efficiently apprehends a wanted criminal standing in the crowd in a direct view of dozens of policemen who are utterly oblivious to his presence.

Sellars, with a substantial help of the influential news-show host Pat Novak (Samuel L. Jackson) - the one who coins Murphy’s new nickname ‘RoboCop’, spins this incident into a massive PR success. And as RoboCop’s presence on the streets of Detroit drastically reduces the crime in the city, the public opinion on the Dreyfus Act begins to turn.

Clara, Murphy’s wife, manages to confront her husband as he is leaving the police station, telling him about the nightmares experienced by their son, David. Murphy seemingly ignores Clara again, but then overrides his crime-fighting software by giving the highest priority to solving his own case. He replays and analyses the video footage from CCTV cameras at his home at the time of his injury and comes to the conclusion that it was seeing his mutilated body after the car explosion, from the window of his upstairs room, that left his son David traumatised. This experience also raises Murphy’s dopamine levels back to normal, thus reviving his lost emotions and feelings towards his family.

Murphy puts the solving of his assassination attempt on the top of the list in his database of unsolved crimes and gradually begins to unravel the whole criminal organization involved in the attempt on his life, all the way up to the corrupt members of the Detroit police department. But when he is about to arrest the Chief of Police, his luck runs out as Rick Mattox (Jackie Earle Haley) - Sellars’s automated military tactical expert who follows Murphy’s actions via the camera in his visor, realises that Murphy went too far this time and intervenes, shutting him down by a remote control and having him taken back to the OmniCorp’s laboratory.

Sellars once again spins this unexpected turn of the events to his advantage via the news-show The Novak Element, where its host Pat Novak points out that the robot policemen, as opposed to human ones, are incorruptible. As a consequence, the public opinion shifts dramatically in OmniCorp's favour, and the repeal of the Dreyfus Act goes underway with votes overwhelmingly in support of the repeal.

In the meantime, Sellars concludes that an android who can override his own program could seriously endanger his plans and decides that RoboCop should be terminated. He orders Mattox to dispose of Murphy. However, Dr. Norton reaches the lab first and revives Murphy, telling him everything. Murphy, feeling betrayed, seeks Sellars for the final confrontation…

Brought right up-to-date with its setting, storyline, and, naturally, some high-quality CGI trickery, and backed by the solid performances of the cast, RoboCop is a worthy update of the classic futuristic thriller. But it is Samuel L. Jackson in his portrayal of the news-show presenter Pat Novak who completely steals the show.