When we make machines to do something that humans used to do, we tend to make them faster at it. One of the things that vampires are known for (in modern interpretations anyway) is being faster than humans.
I’ve seen some authors use this (Daniel Keys Moran’s PKF Elite, Neal Stephenson’s “rat things”, John Steakley’s vampires), but I can’t think of any movies where I’ve seen it used effectively.
Movie cyborgs tend to move like they have chronic joint problems. Yes, the implacable walk into the hail of bullets is impressive, but wouldn’t it be easier to make your Terminator or Robocop able to cover that distance in a hurry and avoid most of the shooting?
Even if it’s mentioned or demonstrated that the cyborg or vampire or whatever is very very fast, they usually drop that idea by the time of the final confrontation.
The main character in Ghost in the Shell is a cyborg who’s more about agility than raw brawn. The end of the movie has her dodging some serious gun fire, although her speed isn’t exactly superhuman. A lot of anime features giant robots being quick and graceful instead of lumbering and massive.
For a while now, I’ve wanted to see a sci-fi movie with a cyborg like the Hulk: massively strong, super fast, and able to leap incredible distances. Strong is strong, wether it’s in the arms or the legs.
About cyborgs and arthritis, my first thought was of Timothy Zahn’s Cobra novels; the “Cobras” were folks who’d gone through some serious cybernetic upgrades–skeletons laminated with newfangled ceramics, joints augmented with servomotors, internal weaponry implants, etcetera–for military purposes. Later on in life, they all tended to develop crippling arthritis and anemia–they could still move faster and stronger than regular folks, but it hurt them badly to do so.
More topically: I think part of the problem (besides the usual Hollywood lack of imagination implicit in “the cyborg/robot/vampire walks implacably through gunfire! Just like that scene from the Terminator, only its more like Terminator meets Raging Bull meets Saving Private Ryan!”) is that super-speed is difficult to show effectively outside of animation. For all its flaws, the Jet Li flick “The One” had moments of effectively showing just how supernaturally fast the characters could move–again, through animation, albeit of the CG kind, and applied in a rather inconsistent manner.
Vampires: Los Muertos and Interview With the Vampire are two movies I can think of where the vampires displayed super human speed at some point in time. They weren’t constantly running around at seventy miles an hour, but they would speed on by at certain points. Los Muertos did it in more the “everything else slows down incredibly, and the vampire moves quickly” way, but it still worked for the scenes they used it in.
As for cyborgs, there have been a few where they don’t always lumber around. American Cyborg and Nemesis are two that come to mind. Of course, whenever this is the case, the cyborgs are generally they type that, whatever ad ons they have, are all internal, or at least, well hidden, so they don’t give the cyborg away in public. That’s where the other types of cyborgs are different, in that, it’s more realistic if someone has a huge prosthetic arm, that it wouldn’t be completely integrated into the arm/let/whatever, and therefore would cause some problems.