Thirty Years Ago: RoboCop (1987)

In addition to being a brilliantly-crafted action and sci-fi movie, the 1987 Paul Verhoeven film RoboCop has also proven itself a forward-looking and trenchant satire of (some) American values in the late 20^th and early 21st century.

The film's use of humor and exaggeration to ridicule contemporary politics is not uncontroversial, either.

To wit, RoboCop is set in a future in which Big Business has finally had its way with the rest of us.

The police force has been privatized. 

A corporate media announces to the world the news that its overlords want disseminated, true or not. 

And raiders in the board room are just as dangerous -- and criminal -- as the thugs prowling the streets by night.  

On the last front, the film makes a clever association. Robocop very explicitly connects two forms of “crook” or criminal.  Both an OCP executive Dick Jones (Ronnie Cox) and drug-dealing, gun-toting murderer Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith) recite an identical line of dialogue in the film, thus forging an indelible link between them.

That line?

“Good business is where you find it.”

RoboCop thus asks a significant question about the direction of our country, which was then in the grip of an economic revolution: What gets lost in a society when the accumulation of wealth becomes the ultimate moral value? 

The answer?

Human life becomes cheap, and everything in society is about selling a product, and about making money.

Verhoeven creates an intriguing and effective tension in the film in order to effectively deliver his satirical points. Now-and-again, he cuts to funny TV commercials that are emblematic of the film’s corporate culture and media, and to TV programs that reveal how the masses are distracted by bread and circuses.

One of those programs involves a well-dressed white man surrounded by beautiful, scantily-clad models quipping “I’d buy that for a dollar!”



The insipid joke is itself an indictment of the culture. Everything and everyone is but a product, or for sale. 

Everyone has his or her price.

Verhoeven next contrasts these moments of high but illuminative comedy with RoboCop’s serious attempts to regain his human identity…to reconnect with the qualities that made him Alex Murphy, a loving family man and a dedicated police officer.

In other words, what RoboCop truly concerns is a machine trying to be a human being in a culture that is inhumane, and unbelievably violent. 

The film’s violence has often been criticized by moral watch-guards as somehow being over-the-top or representative of bad taste…and yet I would argue it is entirely appropriate to the film and its thesis. 

In RoboCop’s world, human life is disposable -- bought and sold for a dollar -- and so the film's violence is extreme enough (and oddly, funny enough too…) to make that point.  

Life is cheap, baby! (Unless you're rich and powerful...).

“He doesn’t have a name. He has a program. He’s a product.”

In advance of a major initiative to re-boot Detroit as ultra-modern Delta City, OCP (Omni Consumer Products) prepares to unroll its new product line: an urban pacification system called ED-209, created by Senior V.P. Richard Jones (Cox).

But when the droid fails, killing a corporate employee in cold blood, a back-up plan is required. An up-and-comer at OCP named Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), proposes to the CEO (Dan O’Herlihy) his own law enforcement system: RoboCop. 

But for it to work, the plan needs a good “human” candidate…a cop with a sense of duty.

When family man and cop, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is murdered by Clarence Boddicker (Smith) and his gang, he becomes that perfect candidate. He is rebooted as the mind of RoboCop, a cyborg police officer possessing at least some of Murphy’s instincts and memories.

Murphy and his partner, Lewis (Nancy Allen) attempt to bring Boddicker to justice, but eventually learn of his criminal connection to Dick Jones. Both are attempting to make a financial killing on the construction of Delta City.

As RoboCop,Murphy attempts to confront Jones and arrest him, but learns that he boass a secret directive that marks him not as a man, but as the property of OCP…

“There’s no better way to steal money than free enterprise.”

RoboCop was crafted in the mid-1980s and it's important that we understand that history, that context, as we consider the film’s satire.

During that span, many big American cities were suffering. Crime was on the rise due to the crack cocaine epidemic. The crime rate peaked in the early 1990s.

And government wasn’t helping much to alleviate the suffering. Here are some statistics to back that up assertion: First, the budget for the Department of Housing and Urban Development was cut from 32.2 billion dollars in 1981 to 7.5 billion in 1987-1988, meaning that government aid was less available for the indigent.

Secondly, the number of Americans living beneath the Federal poverty line rose from 24.5 million to over 32 million in the late eighties.

Additionally, more than two million American citizens were homeless by the latter part of the decade.

While the poor grew poorer, the rich grew richer, and often unethically so. Lest we forget, this was the era of Ivan Boesky, and Michael Milken, businessmen who stole millions of dollars through an unethical business practice: insider trading. In movies, these figures were synthesized as Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987), a corporate raider who believed that “greed is good.”

Meanwhile, the same politicians who cut budgets for social help programs in the 1980s cravenly exploited the average citizen's fear of increased violent crime to win high office, notably with the highly divisive (and highly-effective) Willie Horton TV advertisement in Campaign '88, which made note of a criminal African-American convict robbing, raping and killing a white woman during a prison furlough. First these candidates made life harder for the poor, and then they ran as "tough on crime" candidates, and imposed stiff sentences for first time drug offenders.

In 1986, Hollywood responded to the prevailing Zeitgeist of rising crime, and increased fear about it. A new kind of superhero film gazed closely at all these societal ills. The result was not only a blockbuster action film, but the creation of a popular character that has not yet disappeared from the pop culture terrain, appearing across the decades in films, TV series, cartoons, comic books, and even in a 2014 reboot.

RoboCop was shot in thirteen weeks in the late summer of 1986 on a budget of just ten million dollars, and Verhoeven was reportedly attracted to the material because of its comic-book type of "origin story" as well as the comedic atmosphere and content. The thrust of the satire involved poking fun at American culture and politics, and the course both seemed to be taking during the eighties. 

Indeed, RoboCop accurately and comedically predicted two important facets of our contemporary American life: the corporatization of American culture and the coarsening of the mainstream media.

In terms of its commentary on corporations, RoboCop depicts a company, OCP (Omni Consumer Products) strutting over the whole of Detroit. It has “bought” and privatized the police force, and now its vice-president hopes to introduce military grade equipment for “urban pacification” of the streets. 

This equipment, specifically, involves a giant droid called ED-209.  The only problem is that ED-209 has been already bought and sold...and yet it doesn’t work at all.  As Dick Jones points out.  “Who cares if it works or not?” because he’s already got a contract for it.  The idea underlining all this is that unregulated business, committed to laissez-faire principles, can’t and won't effectively police itself.

The same point is hammered home with the creation of RoboCop. OCP scientists program a police officer -- a cyborg sentry who should protect and serve -- with a secret or classified directive.  The meat of this directive is that RoboCop will shut-down if he attempts to arrest a high-ranking officer in the company.

In other words, OCP has “privatized” RoboCop so that the members of the OCP board are above the law. He can police others, but not them. “We can’t very well have our product turning against us, can we?” Jones asks.

Meanwhile, Jones is secretly allied with a street criminal Clarence Boddicker, with the goal of turning the “gentrified” Detroit, Delta City, into a drug-riddled hellhole.  And the reason? Again, profit. It’s all for money.  Human suffering isn't even in the picture for these men.

What may be most disturbing about Dick Jones’s behavior in RoboCop is not his sense of entitlement because he is rich and powerful, but his absolute disregard for the life of other human beings. A man is killed in the board room demonstration of ED-209, and Jones says, simply, that it is “just a glitch” that caused this (bloody death). 

Later, he murders his rival, Bob (Ferrer), because Bob dared to attempt to be successful himself, at Dick’s expense. 

And finally, Jones sees himself as above the law, reprogramming a police officer (RoboCop), and announcing that he is (“practically”) an extension of the U.S. military.

Pretty clearly then, RoboCop deliberately paints an unflattering picture of big business. Dick Jones and Clarence Boddicker are defined in the film as two sides of the same coin: men who know how to “open new markets” and exploit the free enterprise system, no matter who gets hurt.

Sadly, such men as Dick Jones are considered heroes in the universe of RoboCop and one of the more wicked jokes in the film involves “Lee Iococca Elementary High School,” a name which represents the elevation of a businessman (and one who was bailed out by the U.S. taxpayer, to boot…) to the role of national hero and role model.

RoboCop doesn’t go any easier on the corporate media, or television programming. The heavily made-up, perfectly-coiffed glib newscasters of “Media Break” report, without irony, about the “Star Wars Orbiting Peace Platform” as the film starts.

The conjunction of the words “wars” and “peace” in one title goes unremarked upon. And really, how could it be missed? Quite simply, these aren't journalists, but news readers, reciting talking points to support the agenda of their employers.

In terms of the TV commercials featured in RoboCop, many are quite funny, and yet they deliver the same point about the blasé inhumanity of the culture that the film's violence does.

One advert concerns a family electronic game glorifying nuclear war (based on Milton Bradley's Battleship), called Nuke'Em!  

The game’s motto: “Get them before they get you!” 

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As you can see in the commercial, every foreign policy challenge is met with the threat of absolute over-kill, a tribute to the blood-thirstiness of the populace, and an example, as noted above, of this future’s society’s inhumanity.

Why a game called Nuke’Em in 1987?  Well, again, one must consider context. The film was made in a time in which President Reagan had made a cavalier joke about outlawing "Russia forever" and even threatened that "we begin bombing in five minutes." (August 11, 1984). He also made the erroneous claim in a presidential debate with Walter Mondale that nuclear missiles fired from a submarine could be recalled after launch. So the idea here of a future America where nuclear bombardment was part of the accepted military landscape didn't seem terribly far-fetched.

Even America's endless propensity to drive gas-guzzling, gigantic automobiles (when we know better) is satirized in the prescient RoboCop. Commercials depicted in RoboCop advertise a new vehicle, the 6000 SUX. The 6000 SUX offers a whopping eighteen miles to the gallon, meaning it literally "sucks” gas.  

My car, today, in 2015, gets exactly eighteen miles to the gallon.

RoboCop also accurately predicts our nation’s relentless push towards the privatization of municipal and government programs, the wholesale dismantling of the social safety net. Particularly, much of RoboCop involves OCP's funding and running of the Detroit Police Department "as a business" - designed to make money and worried, therefore, only about the bottom line. Is the company in the red? Or is it in the black?  

Of course, the police force should protect and serve the community, not serve the financial interest of a particular corporate interest. Instead, we see with ED-209, how business, police, and military interests all combine to create a fearsome face for law enforcement.  

And again, RoboCop must be considered prescient for making this point. Today, many localities literally have war machines patrolling the streets.

OCP’s irresponsibility towards the police and the protection of the community is contrasted, strongly, by the value system of the police officers actually depicted in the film. A sergeant, at one point, makes an important point when the idea of a strike is broached, noting that they are all police, not “plumbers.”  He feels a responsibility to the community, a sense that is wholly alien to OCP.

Contrasted with this cruel, heartless, money-obsessed society is the human and personal journey of Alex Murphy. He is transformed from a person into a product by OCP, but still possesses the feelings and memories of a person. 

Murphy’s triumph is that he manages to hold onto his humanity through everything (even death), and acts in accordance with his three good and moral directives: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law. 

And at film’s end, he reveals his victory aloud, suggesting that he should be referred to by his human name, Murphy, and not by his product name, RoboCop.

At least in this case, humanity has beaten the corporate culture. The "heart" of RoboCop rests in Weller's performance, and in the character's development.  He re-discovers his humanity after losing it, and ekes out a victory over OCP, at least temporarily.

RoboCop is a splendidly shot, acted, and designed film. Critic Michael Wilmington noted in his review that RoboCop has been "assembled with ferocious, gleeful expertise, crammed with human cynicism and jolts of energy. In many ways it's the best action movie of the year."

In New Statesman, Judith Williamson praised the film because the "pace is zippy, the script is witty and the political satire is acute."

The film tells an exciting human story, but this is one cinematic effort in which audiences truly can’t separate the satirical message from the narrative details or content. The monster in RoboCop inescapably, is one of man’s own making. 

Intriguingly, the Frankenstein Monster depicted here is not RoboCop, a half-man, half-machine individual, but rather OCP, an organization that has been given legal permission to loot the culture, and determine its direction and health.  

As I’ve written before, science fiction films can lean left or right, and get their points across effectively. I’ve reviewed films positively that espouse each world view if they do so consistently and with wisdom. RoboCop absolutely leans left, and worries about what could happen to a decent, moral culture that allows a money-making organization to become more important than the community itself.

Today, we seldom get movies with such sharp -- nay scorching -- social criticism embedded in their cinematic DNA. Why? Because the same corporations that lobby our politicians for favors also control the news media and entertainment conglomerates.

So in many ways, we're living in an iteration of RoboCop's world, getting the movies that big business want us to see, or thinks we would like.

And that, quite simply, SUX.

Action Figure of the Week: RoboCop: The Series (1990; Skyvision)

Model of the Week: RoboCop (Horizon; 1989)

Pop Art: RoboCop (Marvel Edition)

RoboCop Pinball (Data East)

Trading Card Close-ups: RoboCop 2 (1989; Topps)

Board Game of the Week: RoboCop Ultra Police

Theme Song of the Week: RoboCop: The Series

Cult-Movie Review: RoboCop (2014)

RoboCop (2014) is a top-of-the-line science fiction movie for our time. It features a remarkable cast, strong visual effects and it ponders, with intelligence, some important issues of this epoch.

And yet the reboot -- while never an embarrassment to the long-standing franchise -- is absolutely, categorically, humorless. 

As you may recall, a vital aspect of the 1987 Verhoeven film was its comical skewering of right wing, pro-business policies in a fictional future U.S.A. The ED-209 didn’t just malfunction, for example, he turned an OCP board-member to a bloody pulp.

Meanwhile, the movie’s TV commercials for products such as the board game Nuke ‘Em revealed how the world had become a blood-thirsty, dog-eat-dog world due to rule, essentially, by unregulated corporations.

The new RoboCop finds no humorous corollary for any of these moments, and this, I fear, is a symptom of our times too.

For some reason, horror and science fiction films these days are afraid to be funny, to crack a joke here and there. They are deadly serious, instead, and that level of unremitting “grittiness” can be exhausting.

I suspect it’s the Dark Knight (2008) effect, honestly.

Now, post-Nolan, every genre pic has to be deadly serious and set (largely) at night, so we think it is “authentic” or “real.” It’s funny to contemplate, but Adam West’s Batman (1966 – 1968) cast a pall over superhero productions for a generation by presenting the hero as campy.  It now looks as though the Nolan trilogy has had just as deleterious effects on our age today, taking the genre to such dour, humorless heights that people forget how much fun a good, thoughtful sci-fi picture -- like RoboCop (1987) -- ought to be.

Why do I miss the humor in this RoboCop so much? 

Well, in Verhoeven’s film, the humor made a valuable point about the society as a whole, but it did so without turning the movie into a preachy left-wing diatribe. The commercials and moments of humor leavened the whole thing.

It’s the same reason you want a spoonful of sugar with your medicine, right?

In the original RoboCop, the points about out-of-control right-wing economic politics were still scored -- viciously so, in some circumstances -- but the movie was free to be an action movie, and not a sermon. We could look at all the pieces of the social critique, recognize them, and then laugh at our recognition of them. We could still have a good time, even while nodding in agreement about the nature of the exaggerated, fictional world.

Sometimes, the world really feels this way…

The new RoboCop proceeds from a point of far greater seriousness, and yet its point -- that people aren’t the property of corporations -- doesn’t transmit nearly as effectively as similar messages did in RoboCop, or even the gonzo-bonkers sequel, RoboCop 2 (1990).

This doesn’t mean the new film isn’t intelligent. It’s a smart and earnest movie. I liked it. But I didn’t admire it in the way I still do the original film.

The new RoboCop can be credited, absolutely, with rethinking the details of Alex Murphy’s story for our times. This version of the tale focuses on American military engagements in the Middle East, the plight of veterans who return home less than whole, and the use of drones or otherwise automated hardware against our citizenry.

It’s an intriguing angle for certain, and yet, again, the film somehow doesn’t feel as visceral or as moving as the original RoboCop did, even when it takes the time to explore aspects of the character’s personal life that the original didn’t touch…like the plight of Murphy’s wife and son.

Again, RoboCop is no embarrassment. It’s not a terrible, unthinking, or slapdash “re-boot.” But in the final analysis, it doesn’t carry the ball any further down the field than the original did. Objectively, it’s just not as good as the original was -- even though the argument could be made that the film is quite well-done -- and so its very purpose must be called into question.

Do we need a RoboCop reboot that doesn’t improve on Verhoeven’s original vision?  If so, why? 

It seems to me that this is the most important question that needs answering here.  All the solid work of the admittedly impressive cast and director Jose Padhila, doesn’t quite validate the existence of a film that feels, at times, so mechanical.

“A machine does not understand how it feels to be human.”

In an America of the near future, the corporation OCP wants more than anything to sell its robotic sentinels -- ED-209 and ED-208 -- to crime-infested cities. But CEO Raymond Sellars (Michael Keaton) can’t open this market because of the settled law of the land.  The Dreyfus Act forbids robotic hardware to be in a position where it can police the American people.

Sellars suspects he can get around this edict by putting a man into such a machine, and marketing that man and his “conscience” to the American people. 

When Detroit cop, Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) is grievously injured in a bombing, Sellars has his candidate for that job.  He goes to a well-respected doctor, Dennett Norton (Gary Oldman) and tells him to build…a Robocop.

When Murphy awakes, he discovers he is not quite the man he used to be.  Only one hand, his brain, his face, his lungs and his throat survived the bombing and the ensuing surgery.  Now he is more machine than man, housed in a complex robot body.  At the very least, however, he will still get to see his wife, Clara (Abbie Cornish) and his son, David.

When RoboCop hits the streets of Detroit and proves a success at stopping crime, the U.S. Senate holds a vote to repeal the Dreyfus Act. 

But with that repeal, RoboCop is now obsolete.  He has outlived his value to Sellars…

“It’s great to see American machines helping to promote peace and freedom abroad.”

The new RoboCop could almost be titled RoboSoldier because its primary concern is the post-Iraq War world. The film’s events occur during an American occupation of Iran (and Tehran, specifically), as ED-209s and humanoid ED-208s patrol the streets, enforcing the peace at gunpoint. 

Meanwhile, veterans come home to America physically broken, and scientists like the sympathetic Doctor Norton (Oldman), attempt to make them whole again with robotic limbs. There's a remarkable scene in the film of a man learning to use his robot hands to play the guitar. It's hopeful and sad at the same time.

Although technically not a soldier, Murphy comes home broken too, and must -- with all the changes inside him, and all the horror he has seen -- re-integrate into his family unit and his former life.  But of course, he is a changed man, literally, and again, this is the precise story that many soldiers face upon returning stateside, and to their homes.  

They are not who they once were.They are changed, even altered psychologically, by their war experiences. And Murphy faces this problem too. He undergoes a kind of robotic version of PTSD and doctors reduce his Dopamine level so that he acts, with his family, like a "zombie." He hardly seems to recognize his loved ones.

At the same time, on the home front, right-wing voices of “law and order” on TV demand that the American street be pacified too, using the same machines patrolling Tehran. 

But a liberal senator, Dreyfus, created a bill (and then a law) which prevents the use of such military equipment in American cities. 

Again, this dramatic scenario is ripped straight out of current events. In 2015, more and more police units in metropolitan areas are gearing up with military hardware, and more and more Americans are growing afraid that they could be the target of drones, or other machines of war, during moments of civil disobedience. Are police our protectors, or occupiers of our cities?  Very many, that line seems to be blurred.

The new RoboCop handles this paradigm well, and quite intelligently.  The commentary is smart, and often ironic, but it is never sharp enough, or funny enough, to leave a significant impact. Samuel L. Jackson plays a right-wing TV pundit/bloviator Pat Novak who complains about “robo-phobic” America and stands in front of giant screens of the American flag, draping himself in patriotism that is more aptly fascism.  This isn't satire though. This is an accurate depiction of certain personalities in the current media.

Novak calls the Tehran occupation a peaceful one, and notes -- immediately prior to a boy’s death by ED-209 -- that for the first time Iranian people can raise their children in safety and security.

The point is made ironically, of course. Novak spouts propaganda; and we see for our own eyes that it isn’t the truth. There’s no safety and security here, only an invading force occupying the city.

But the moment isn’t funny, because the new RoboCop doesn’t get the idea that was transmitted so clearly in the original.  

If you want to make a really memorable point about something, then you take reality and exaggerate it. You take it one step further than reality.

Go out of bounds with it a little. 

Instead, the reboot speculates, in dead serious fashion, about the use of military technology in other lands, and here at home. We get serious war scenes, with a youthful casualty. But this footage seems like it could be real, and from today, with just a few exceptions.

Paul Verhoeven, I suspect, would have treated the moment very differently. He would killed that Iranian kid in the most grievous, bloody, over-the-top, politically incorrect fashion, and then, for punctuation, have had Pat Novak label him a terrorist. 

We all would have gasped.

And then we would have heard some nervous titters or giggles from fellow audience members at the bad taste of the whole thing…and yet the point would have been made irrevocably. 

Our words, ideals, and our actions not only fail to line up, that scene would have expressed, they actually have no relation to one another.  

This was the essence of many Media Break moments in the original franchise. Remember in RoboCop 2 how Leeza Gibbons griped about environmentalists who complained about a nuclear meltdown in the Amazon Rain Forest.  

Those pesky environmentalists! They’re always complaining about something!

In the reboot, the ironic event (the death of a child during a “peaceful” robot patrol) is noted, but it just kind of hangs there on the screen, flat. The moment is played dead straight, and so the opportunity to expose Novak’s hypocrisy and propaganda is lost, at least to some significant degree.

To reiterate, I believe it is commendable that RoboCop attempts to tackle a serious subject: American military equipment exported to places where it is neither desired, nor helpful, by corporations who want to open big markets and make money. But the movie has no really illuminating or memorable viewpoint to note about the subject.

It's text vs. subtext, I guess, at least in some ways.

Also, it is commendable, I believe that this iteration of RoboCop expends the time and energy to showcase what Clara (Abbie Cornish), Murphy’s wife, goes through, following his injury and resurrection.  

She goes through Hell, and it’s the same Hell that so many military families go through in real life. A soldier is catastrophically-wounded, on the verge of death. How do you help him or her? How much do you consider quality of life for the injured vets? How much can technology help?

These are serious questions, and I appreciate that this RoboCop goes further than the original (and its sequels) did in charting this aspect of Murphy’s life.

The performances are all very good, too. Gary Oldman projects decency and humanity as the doctor who tries to make things better, but realizes he has gone too far. Michael Keaton is appropriately asshole-ish as OCP CEO Raymond Sellars, a man used to getting his way, and willing to use the media and the government to get what he wants. 

Joel Kinnaman is fine as Murphy/RoboCop too, but the role still belongs to Peter Weller. With Weller, you got a sense of Alex’s kind of gentle goofiness. Remember him trying to twirl his gun to impress his son? Or racing Lewis to the car, and driving it, his first day on the job, over her objections? 

It’s difficult to put this into words, but even though the new RoboCop gives the character more interaction with his family, and a deeper character arc, it is Weller’s Murphy who somehow seems more truly, legitimately human.  The new Murphy wants to solve cases, and bring people to justice. He’s like a cliché movie cop, dedicated, even as a robot, to bringing in a perp.  The old RoboCop wanted to impress his son, fit in on the job, and be a good cop. 

There’s a measure of difference there that’s worth noting.

The new film also fails to make an important connection, one that was so vital to the original work of art.  In Verhoeven’s film, Dick Jones and Clarence Boddicker were two sides of the same coin: board room thugs, and street thugs. Here, the plot involving the gun-runner Antoine Vallon, doesn’t really connect meaningfully with Sellars and his machinations. The plots are separate, and the Vallon plot doesn’t really go anywhere.

The new RoboCop also seems to have a lot less action in it too. 

One on hand, people could say it is a more mature film than the original was, since it attempts to focus on emotions and character arcs.  

On the other hand, the old film had action and satire -- it was exciting and smart -- so it’s hard to argue that it wasn’t a more fully realized work of art. This RoboCop takes itself very seriously, yet doesn’t  make its commentary stick in anything approaching a memorable or striking way.  

Again, I don’t wish to present the impression that the remake is terrible, or even bad. I’ve watched the film twice now. Once last year, and then again two nights ago, after finishing up the other RoboCop films. 

Clearly, the 2014 film is much better than RoboCop 3 (1993) was. No one in their right mind would argue otherwise. But by eliminating the humor and satirical angle of the series, this RoboCop film feels just as flat as that film did, at least at certain points.

The story, the performances, the visual effects are all superior, for certain, but this is, no doubt the “Tin Man” version of RoboCop. 

All head. No heart. And certainly no funny bone.

Movie Trailer: RoboCop (2014)

Cult-Movie Review: RoboCop 3 (1993)

RoboCop 3 (1993) is the weakest entry in the sturdy sci-fi film franchise, and that tally includes the 2014 reboot (which I’ll review here soon…)

It’s not so much that RoboCop 3 features an underwhelming story, but rather that the narrative is vetted in a flat, colorless manner, with no flair or humor whatsoever. RoboCop/Murphy undergoes some major life events here -- including the tragic, unjust the loss of the only human who has consistently stood by him -- but there’s not a moment in the whole picture that feels important, or emotionally powerful. The few jokes featured in the film fall flat too, or are poorly executed.

And even the social critique is less prominent and less pointed than it ought to be. This Fred Dekker-helmed sequel is positively toothless, and that’s something you could never say about Verhoeven’s original, or even the controversial Kershner follow-up.

Perhaps most disappointingly, a rampant form of “kiddie-fication” has seeped into this the formerly adult franchise. The first and second RoboCops were violent, adult satires, but RoboCop 3 is abundantly kid-friendly -- and bloodless -- to its own detriment.  A major character in the tale is a little orphaned girl who saves RoboCop, and the whole subplot is underwhelming.

RoboCop 3 is only 104 minutes long, but it seems to go on forever, without anything truly interesting or original occurring.

“Driving people out of their homes is no job for a police officer.”

OCP (Omni Consumer Products) struggles under new management, and has been bought out by the Japanese company, Kanemitsu. The corporation's only chance of survival is the long-delayed Delta City; a new metropolis to rise from the ashes of crime-ridden Old Detroit.

OCP has hired mercenaries and organized them as an outfit called “Rehabilitation Services” to clean out the last vestiges of Old Detroit, particularly an area known as Cadillac Heights. There, an armed resistance has sprung up among the people.

When RoboCop (Burke) and Officer Lewis (Allen) join the ranks of the resistance, Kanetmitsu sends robo-ninjas called “Otomo” to assassinate the cyborg.  Meanwhile, Lewis is killed in cold blood by McDaggett (John Castle), leader of Rehabilitation Services.

Badly wounded, RoboCop is nursed back to health by his friend, Dr. Lazarus (Jill Hennessy), and by a computer-minded orphan, Nikki (Remy Ryan). 

Once back to full strength, RoboCop utilizes a jet-pack to take the fight to OCP…

“Stay here. Fight for your home. There is no silver lining.”

The first thing to note about RoboCop 3, perhaps, is that some of the franchise's most important cast members have left the building. 

Peter Weller is gone as Alex Murphy, replaced by the satisfactory-but-not-particularly-memorable Robert Burke. And Dan O’Herlihy -- who played OCP’s Old Man so effectively -- is also gone. Nancy Allen is back as Officer Lewis, but her character is killed off relatively early in the proceedings. 

So RoboCop 3 feels a bit like going back to your family home only to learn that everyone you love has moved out. This helps to create the impression that the franchise has been downgraded from top-of-the-line to run-of-the-mill.

Certainly, budget is a problem too. RoboCop 3 is a catastrophic step down in terms of spectacle from the previous two entries.  

In RoboCop, for example, our hero went up against the amazing (and funny) ED 209.  

In RoboCop 2, Cain was also a memorable leviathan, a true menace in his giant metal armor (and Nazi-styled helmet).  

Here, RoboCop goes up against...a team of identical Ninja warriors (who happen to be cyborgs or humanoid robots).  It saves money, I suppose, to have the same actor play multiple humanoid bots.

But the cost of that "savings" is significant. 

There’s just no one here in terms of villainy who successfully holds the screen when RoboCop is missing.  

Rip Torn’s OCP CEO is a silly, inconsequential knock-off of The Old Man, and Bradley Whitford’s Fleck is a poor copy of Miguel Ferrer’s Bob Morton. Even McDaggett, the leader of the Rehabs, feels like a by-the-numbers villain all the way. Why is he evil? Why does he take such glee in killing and evicting people?  He's a sneering two-dimensional villain, but no more than that.

The sequel does introduce a unique menace...briefly. At one point, Lewis and some other Detroit officers are surrounded by freaky gang members called "Splatterpunks." After the punks are introduced (and dispatched by RoboCop), they are hardly examined by the screenplay at all, except as back-up soldiers for OCP when the cops go rogue.

Who are these guys? Why do they dress like this?  Why are the cops terrified of them?

RoboCop 3 has no answers for you.

More genuinely disappointing than any of these lapses or deficits, however, is the fact that the balance of the RoboCop world has shifted in a way that diminishes the special nature of that world.

Specifically, OCP has always sat in the cat-bird seat because of the (fictional) culture’s exaggerated adherence to capitalism. And OCP has had the media in its back pocket too. Meanwhile, the people -- going up against such corporate interests -- simply can’t fight back. In some sense, OCP is unbeatable because it is part of the Establishment. The whole system is revealed as corrupt because OCP is untouchable.

RoboCop -- a product of OCP -- fights crime, but, importantly, never takes down OCP, only its malfunctioning machines and law-breaking board room (ex)officers. The company survives and endures, and that’s a message about capitalism and its position of favor and entitlement in American society. 

In real life, look how well Big Business did after the taxpayers bailed it out in the Great Recession. A lot of regular folks lost their jobs, their savings, and their retirement accounts. But how many businessmen went to jail for gambling and losing that wealth?  How many huge companies went under?

In RoboCop 3, this view of unregulated business is undercut. Now OCP has an army in the streets and is literally waging war on the people.  The people have taken up arms and are fighting back.  These facts make the conflict very different in nature, and don't permit for the kind of biting satire we have seen before.  Suddenly, we’re in a much more traditional, non-satirical world, where OCP, the equivalent of the “Galactic Empire” can simply be defeated...by guns (and a cyborg with a jet pack prototype). 

My point is that the government (in this fictional world) would never let OCP fall. It’s too big to fail. OCP would be propped up in some way by the taxpayers, and the media would be selling that idea morning, noon and night. But instead, OCP becomes just a paper tiger in the film, one to be knocked-down by freedom fighters in Detroit who are protecting their homes.

It doesn't ring true, based on the already-established RoboCop universe.

To its credit, RoboCop 3 clearly does anticipate a few aspects of the 21st century. First, it imagines that private mercenaries will be used in armed conflicts. In the Iraq War, we saw just that with Blackwater, for sure.  

And secondly, the film imagines the age of military equipment patrolling our streets; the idea of law enforcement as an army occupying American neighborhoods.

The idea was actually suggested in RoboCop (1987) when Dick Jones noted that OCP and the military were “practically” one in the same. That idea is developed here, in the 1993 sequel, and is indeed prophetic. But the point isn’t transmitted in any satirical or trenchant way.  

The media, similarly, is rendered toothless. The vapid anchor of Media Break actually walks off-set rather than believe that RoboCop is a criminal, thus totally undercutting the franchise’s criticism of the media as a tool of corporations.  

Why make a point about principled journalism here when previous movies went to great lengths to view corporate media as brown-nosing propaganda tools?

Alas, humor is pretty much absent from RoboCop 3, at least in any effective way. 

One visual gag involves RoboCop shooting an enemy’s gun repeatedly, so that the weapon bounces around in the air, like it has a life of its own. The moment looks so completely fake and unconvincing that there’s no opportunity for laughter, only derision.

Similarly, the stunt wherein Murphy rides his squad car off a parking garage roof and it lands perfectly parked in the middle of a gun battle, is edited poorly.  The angle of the car going off the roof, and the angle of the car at landing don’t fit together at all, thus acknowledging visually the physical impossibility of the stunt. When focusing on the physics, again, the desire to laugh is lost.

There are fewer funny “commercial breaks” in RoboCop 3 too, and these moments are missed. “Nuke Em” and “Magna Volt (Lethal Response)" revealed to audiences something about the larger culture, in the earlier films, in particular its sense of blood-lust.  RoboCop 3 gives us a propaganda commercial for Rehab action figures, transforming cold-hearted evictors into macho heroes. But the commercial just isn’t funny.

RoboCop 3 also makes one more unforgivable misstep. It takes away the gum-snapping, tough-talking Lewis, and replaces her, as RoboCop’s buddy, with a cute-as-a-button little orphan girl.  

It’s not a fair trade.  

RoboCop is not kid friendly, and that’s actually one of the points made in RoboCop 2.  Remember how Dr. Faxx attempted to transform our favorite cyborg into a cuddly friend of children?  RoboCop had to purge himself of that role; violently so.  

Here, however, it seems like Dr. Faxx is in charge of the movie itself, turning RoboCop into an acceptable role model, hero, and buddy.  

Why?  Was that really a story that needed to be told?

The kiddification is bad enough, but this is such a lousy story in which to lose Lewis.  What does she have on the line when she dies? Is her death meaningful? Does it add to the story, if only in terms of RoboCop's learning?  

Alas, it's difficult to answer in the affirmative.  Like every other moment in the film, Lewis's death plays as flat and unimportant.   

A beloved character dies and the film can't bother to get emotional about it.  Right there, on your screen, the movie just flat-lines.  

A deeply disappointing film, RoboCop 3 is too long and not nearly sharp enough to carry its franchise title. The next stop for the property was Canadian Television, and RoboCop: The Series (1994).

But honestly, RoboCop 3 feels like its half-way there already.  

This is the worst, most unsatisfying entry in the entire line.