After recently giving the trilogy a re-watch, some elements of the story struck me differently than when I saw them as a kid.
The original RoboCop film in 1987 is one of those movies that tells a great standalone story, and the best test of this was that there were enough themes and ideas that could be fleshed out into a full trilogy. RoboCop doesn’t need sequels but had enough to give sequels something to say. Contrast that with how virtually every Hollywood movie now is a completely transparent attempt to set up a “cinematic universe” and it’s really annoying. Imagine going on a date with a person who from the first minute is trying to push you to go on a second, third, and fourth date. That would be annoying, right? The same concept applies to movies. The story should be enjoyable in the moment, and not an overt sales pitch to convince you to buy tickets to sequels that haven’t even been made yet.
It also doesn’t help that the writers of new movies tend to not be remotely competent either. It’s like they attended film school just long enough to learn about “Checkov’s Gun,” then quit the program.
What if there was Chekhov’s Gun, but everything was Chekhov’s Gun? Chekhov’s table, Chekhov’s dog. Chekhov’s dice. Every single object should be a reference to something that will happen later in the film, referenced over and over again in sequels and spin off shows, then sold as franchise-related toys and consumer products? Being reflexively self-referential is clever in the same sense a toy commercial is clever. It’s not clever at all and the actual motive is obvious.
The sequels didn’t even have to be particularly good, they had enough inertia from the first movie to be interesting. So in this sense, RoboCop was a great foundation for sequels. There was lore, but it was all relevant to the plot and contributed to the characters and environment feeling believable. The first story told, without sequels, was simply a Christ parable, and the movie was not shy about it. Murphy is crucified, comes back from the dead as RoboCop, and performs miracles. He even walks on water.
Then there is Anne Lewis, Murphy/RoboCop’s extremely under non-superpowered partner. Lewis is great for the exact reason she’s the opposite of RoboCop. Not only does Lewis not have super powers, her skills at policing are a little pedestrian. She loses more fights than she wins. At one point in RoboCop 2 she loses a fight to a literal child. The main thing is that she’s not invulnerable and gets shot up or otherwise injured constantly. Really though, nobody is RoboCop’s equal and being his partner is more of a thankless hazard than anything else. Every situation with the two of them hits different when you think about the fact that she is in much more danger than him. But Lewis does it anyway out of sense of devotion to her partner and duty. That’s what makes her endearing as a character.
Every hero needs worthy villains, which in this case are the evil capitalist Dick Jones (any movie character after 1970 named “Dick” can be safely assumed to be bad) and the psychopath gangster Clarence. OCP’s evil plan to privatize Detroit could play out to a logical conclusion with new characters and story elements added as needed, like the city’s inept diversity-hire mayor and Cain’s drug cult. Actually, it is the villains of RoboCop that made me think of re-watching it. We have watched a lot of old Soviet movies lately, and one characteristic that stood out to me is that the capitalists in American movies are more evil than the capitalists in Soviet movies, which is funny.
Dick Jones reminds me of Turanchox in the 1980 Soviet sci-fi film Per Aspera Ad Astra. In that movie, a human spaceship travels to an alien planet to clean up their polluted atmosphere with a teraforming process. Turanchox hates this idea because he owns a corporation that sells people clean air and food. If the earth scientists fix the environment, Turanchox would go out of business and lose all of his power he has over the population. Defending what he has is what compels Turanchox to kill. Dick Jones is much worse and more evil than him.
Clarence reminds me of the villain in the 1971 Soviet comedy Gentlemen of Fortune, about a school teacher the police ask to help with their investigation because he looks like a gangster they’re chasing (the teacher and the gangster are played by the same actor, which is part of the comedy).
The gangster, Alexander, is contrasted with his good guy body double Yevgeny contrast each other in a similar way as Clarence and Murphy/RoboCop. Clarence is a feral beast who crawled out of the underworld of Detroit and Murphy is the do-gooder who is trying to do the right thing and give back to the community. In the same way, Yevgeny is a decorated war hero who left his quiet life as a school teacher to help the police on a dangerous assignment. Also like Murphy, Yevgeny probably gets a thrill out of excitement, which he wasn’t getting from his teacher job.
Alexander is portrayed as a dangerous feral animal that the other criminals fear out of reputation, even if they haven’t met him. In one scene, two of Alexander’s associates try to ambush him and he casually kills them both. Killing doesn’t bother Alexander and he never feels any remorse, but he’s not a psychopath and doesn’t go around killing for no reason. Alexander is human enough that it is possible to understand that he was human once, before presumably having a hard childhood, turning to crime, becoming tougher and more ruthless than the other criminals, and eventually passing the point where any kind of rehabilitation or redemption was possible. Meanwhile his henchmen are portrayed in a sympathetic light. He’s not like Clarence, who is just a psychopath. His most humanizing moment was when RoboCop was tossing him around like a rag doll and he immediately rolls on his boss Dick. Despite the tough guy persona and all the suffering he inflicts on other people, he can’t handle any himself.
Clarence was a compelling psychopath character, but that became a problem in the sequels. Cain, the big baddie in RoboCop 2, is also a psychopath and there’s virtually no difference in their motivations except fluff. Nonetheless, Cain is still entertaining as a villain as long as you don’t think too much about him being a repackaged Clarence. At the end, Cain is turned into an upgraded version of RoboCop, which is the cardinal movie-making sin of having the good guy fight a bad version of himself. Though to be fair, this was 1990, and the “fight a bad version of yourself” trope hadn’t been done a billion times already.
I had a few other peeves about RoboCop 2. My biggest problem was that the beginning was a nearly identical play-by-play of the first movie. RoboCop goes into an abandoned factory to catch Cain but is ambushed and torn apart. Okay cool, but was it not possible to think of something slightly different than what happened already? I also don’t like that the child genius character swears so much. It is weird to me to have an actual child say a bunch of foul things. And the naughty language didn’t add anything to his character, he could have just talked normally.
Flaws aside, it was a worthy sequel.
Then came the most hated movie of the trilogy, Robocop 3. Okay so I went into this movie really trying to like it, convinced that it didn’t deserve the bad rep. I was only partially successful at forcing myself to like it. The first time around I had watched it with kid eyes so the flaws escaped me.
First off, right from the opening shot, it’s a toy commercial. The little girl’s room has a toy RoboCop and a toy ED-209. It’s Chekhov’s toys, or Toys Inception. Real-life RoboCop toys from our universe also exist in RoboCop’s universe. This scene also introduces the other big problem with the movie, Nikko, a 9-year-old girl with wizard-like computer hacking abilities.
I understand why she’s in the movie. The filmmakers wanted to sell more toys, which is why Robocop 3 has a PG-13 rating instead of the hard R of its predecessors, and the cheesy gore gone with it. But it wasn’t enough to just be child-friendly, the movie needed an actual child. Remember that this was the 90s, when American movies were all pushing cool kid characters with laptop computers, which at the time were still very expensive. Presumably, this was corporate propaganda to pressure parents into buying them (the laptops, not the kids). The most obnoxious laptop propaganda that comes to my mind is when Jeff Goldblum used a Macintosh™ to hack an alien spaceship in Independence Day. At least he was an adult.
To be clear, I don’t hate Nikko, it’s just weird they insisted on her being so young. If Nikko was 16 or 17 it would be at least conceivable that she would be very good with computers. Nikko just gets so much screen time, but there’s very little she can say or do with adults. She even gets one-on-one time with RoboCop, but what can RoboCop say to a 9-year-old? Absolutely nothing so it was a waste of the audience’s time. If Nikko was a teenager, she would be old enough for an adult conversation, but still a lot younger than everyone else so could have a different perspective. Maybe she could surprise him with an insight into a shared experience or worry. What’s it like to be uprooted into a body that he didn’t ask for, can’t feel like is his and he doesn’t have any control over? Funnily enough, no one ever actually asked him this in all three movies.
The other perk to having a teenage girl character is that teenage boys will like the movie, even if it’s stupid.
I had actually completely forgotten about the insidious Japanese corporation until I re-watched the movie. This was the ’90s, so the Japanese were the yellow menace of the time, and it looks really incredibly silly in hindsight. But this did not stop us from finding another equally silly yellow menace in China and completely memory-hole the anti-Japan hysteria from just a decade or so earlier.
Japanese bad guys are problematic because they completely undermine the OCP homegrown bad American corporation the last two movies had spent building up. All that hype and they turn out to just be patsies for a Japanese guy who shouts threatening gibberish on the video-conference screen. The robot ninja is cool, but he feels completely out of place. In this universe, American corporations can’t build a robot who can climb stairs, but the Japanese built one that is so good it can pass as human? What was even the point of messing with RoboCop cyborg technology in the first place if artificial intelligence was already this good?
And the Japanese are related to yet another problem with RoboCop 3. There are far too many side characters and subplots. Combined with sloppy writing, a lot of the movie comes across as redundant. There is this rebel alliance of people fighting OCP, and there is a traitor in their midst, who of course is an extremely awful person so it is obvious that he is a traitor within the first 3 seconds of seeing him. He’s easy to spot in part because he is so similar in personality and even looks similar to the Officer Duffy bad cop character in RoboCop 2. But his worst quality is that he’s redundant.
He’s so redundant, I actually forgot he existed until I re-watched the movie. There’s a scene when the robot ninja kills some rebels and finds a plastic map overlay on one of their bodies. He gets a map later and uses the overlay to find the rebel base. So not only is robot ninja a great warrior, he is also a detective. There’s nothing this guy can’t do!
But then the traitor guy sells out the rebels and the location of their base. But literally what was the point of this if the robot ninja already knew where it was? Like I said, I had forgotten the traitor existed. I just assumed the robot ninja told OCP where the base was. The traitor could have been completely cut from the movie and no plot points would have been lost.
Aside from the writing and lousy editing, Peter Weller’s replacement as RoboCop in the third movie, Robert Burke, was just not up to the task. As it turns out, wearing a clunky fully body suit and acting like a killer cyborg with a heart is a pretty tough role, and Weller completely knocked it out of the park. Burke tried his best, but just couldn’t match what his predecessor brought to the role.
A lot of fans complain about Anne Lewis dying, but I don’t agree. The church scene when she dies defending innocent people wasn’t bad or inappropriate for the final movie, it just wasn’t particularly well executed. There was Chekhov’s body armor, when Lewis loudly tells a co-worker she doesn’t need a vest because she’s off duty, foreshadowing with the subtlety of a brick that she’s going to get blown away five minutes later. I don’t mean to be ableist, and am glad the movie has narration for the blind, but those of us who can see can clearly tell she’s not wearing body armor, there wasn’t a need to point it out.
In fairness to Lewis, she was in a hurry. The first Robocop movie explained that girls have to be completely naked when putting on body armor. Putting the vest over your shirt isn’t an option. Lewis did not have time to take off all her clothes, and was in public, so couldn’t wear the vest. Fair.
This other gal even has stylish nude-colored kevlar. You never know when a guy might try to shoot you, so it is best to always be prepared.
I call RoboCop 3 a bad good movie. There overall execution was kind of bad, but there’s a good movie in there somewhere and definitely some great moments. My favorite scene is when RoboCop commandeers the pimpmobile.
Ian Kummer
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