Which brings me to RoboCop 3. I've never seen it. Someone like me, who lived and breathed the Half-Man, Half-Machine while I was growing up to have not seen the third one might seem a little out of character. It's one of those movies you hear bad things about and attempt to avoid so as to hold the image you have of the character in an untarnished light. Admittedly, I've never been one to let popular opinion keep me from watching something that might even come close to entertaining me, but I still never gave this one a shot. I've seen bad sequels to movies I hold much higher in estimation than RoboCop before. Take Jaws: The Revenge for example. Of course, to be fair, I saw Jaws: The Revenge at an age that if you were to throw a goldfish into a home video and called him Jaws, I would of thought it brilliant. I think I was beyond that age when Robo rolled around.
And then lo, from on high, came Netflix Streaming. And then came RoboCop 3. And I simply can't believe how this movie blew my mind. Here are a couple of reasons why, if you don't believe me. And if you care, spoilers ahoy.
This is the movie that....
MADE NINJA ASSASSIN ROBOTS BORING
Seriously, this movie has the most superfluous use of Ninja Assassins I believe you will ever see committed to film. If you take the evil Ninja Robots out of the movie, it would make absolutely no difference. That's how much they matter to the plot. Never mind how we are dealing with a world in which RoboCop is one of the most advanced pieces of technology out there, now there are suddenly Ninja Assassin Robots that look exactly like humans that make him seem almost obsolete. I might overlook that glaring plot contrivance if they were actually cool. Or, you know, threatening. All they do is to serve to trip RoboCop up a time or two in two scenes at most before he blasts them into oblivion. At least in RoboCop 1 and 2, Ed209, Clarence Boddicker and Cain really screwed RoboCop up pretty royally. This guy chops RoboCop's hand off, Robo just replaces it with a machine gun attachment and blows the guys head off. End of fight. What a lame Terminator knock-off that guy (and his look-a-likes) turned out to be.
MADE LEWIS GO OUT LIKE A PUNK
Officer Anne Lewis became Murphy's partner right before he got blown away and became RoboCop. She was also the first to realize just who this walking tin can really was. She was there by his side every time he went against orders or into situations where they were likely not to get out alive. Now I understand the actress asked to be killed off. And there's nothing wrong with killing off a strong supporting character when it means something. In this movie, it was meant to pit RoboCop against the evil OCP home eviction crew. Who he was going to be against anyway. They play up her death as a reason that he turns his back on the law and supports the rebels, but the story was heading in that direction anyways. That was why he and Lewis were in the fire fight that got her killed to begin with. Sam Jackson famously asked George Lucas to not let him die like a punk in the Star Wars Prequels. If he was gonna go, he wanted to go out in style, not like some meaningless piece of collateral damage. Lewis died like a punk. If you're gonna kill off a character like that, let's not do it during an impersonal fire fight, give her a good death. And not some cheesy dying line about making the bad guys pay. We'll miss you Officer Lewis, but your death was lame and lacking in any emotion.
THAT TOOK AWAY PETER WELLER
I can't blame the guy playing RoboCop for being "Not" Peter Weller, it's obviously not his fault. However, the lack of Peter Weller is a bit jarring, especially at first. The voice and movements seem a bit off, but that's just the least of it. When you kill his partner, who we associate with Weller's partner, and expect his reaction to hold the same emotion Weller would bring is kinda stupid. Look, I get that he did not want to come back and that we should see RoboCop - not Peter Weller - but it's like when George Lazenby took over James Bond from Sean Connery and they married him off and made a widow of him within like five minutes, it just didn't ring as emotionally true as if it were the actor we are used to going through the trauma. RoboCop, in the last couple of movies, has been slowly gaining his humanity back. The Murphy-ness of his true self. Suddenly, here we have some other square jaw in the suit playing him robotic again. His expression never changes when helmet is off. He tosses off Schwarzenegger-esque one liners (that I admittedly got a giggle out of), but the Murphy we know seemed to regress a bit. Again, I can't fault the guy for his lack of being Peter Weller, but perhaps a stronger script that would have played to his strengths would have been called for. Or how aboutjust a stronger script, period. That would have been nice.
INTRODUCED A CUTE LITTLE KID
And what's more, she's a hacker! That's right, this cute little curly haired girl, separated from her parents during OCP's eviction of her neighborhood, can hack into one of the most violently fearsome robots of previous movies, ED209, and turn him into a guard puppy dog in about 2 minutes flat. I am of the personal opinion that the insertion of Cute Little Kids (tm) can turn PG sequels into something less than they should be. Did we really need to see Zorro's precocious little spawn taking up so much screen time in "Legend of Zorro"? Imagine what it does to a RoboCop movie. A franchise where the last 9 year old kid was a foul mouthed drug dealer. Serving as RoboCop's attachment to humanity in this installment, this little moppet scurries throughout the movie endearing herself to rebels, former OCP technicians and cyborgs alike and putting the smear of Cute all over a movie that could use all the cynical grittiness it can get.
TOOK THE STING OUT OF THE COP
I remember when I was little, watching RoboCop shocked me with it's ultra violence. Murphy's death. ED209s murderous malfunction in the conference room. Emil's toxic car wash. Probably not things I should have been watching at that age, but just because I shouldn't be watching it doesn't mean they should aim a movie in the franchise at people that age. RoboCop was never a Superman-esque hero. He was a jab at the future of commercialism and corporate power that the filmmaker's saw on the horizon. He just happened to be an awesome character who appealed to teenaged boys, even if the movie wasn't aimed for that age. The studios saw this, of course, and decided to give them a movie and in doing so, they de-fanged RoboCop. It's obvious throughout the entire movie, but especially at the end, when the cops team with the rebels against OCP and a big fire fight breaks out and goes on forever without anyone seemingly even getting hurt. RoboCop flies by with his RoboJetPack (I'm not even going to go into this atrocity), blows up the tank with a missile attachment, then flies on to OCP headquarters to save the Cute Kid and that's about that as far as the big standoff. I'm not usually one saying movies need to be super violent to be entertaining, but I think when you take that away from RoboCop, you're messing with the DNA.
All that said, I can't help but not hate the movie too much. Taken as a B-Movie that happens to star a character I really enjoy, RoboCop, I can get some entertainment out of it. I've certainly been entertained by worse movies. As a true sequel to the world, tone and character as devised by Paul Verhoeven and the writers of the original, this falls so short, they might as well not even have tried.
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