Trailer:
"Robocop is now off waranty!"
The original Robocop quickly made the grade as a pulp culture icon, critical hit, and box office success. As with every superhero film this always acts as a greenlight to line up an entire trilogy/ franchise. Hell, even films that fail to do any three of these usually have people trying to push a trilogy. Either way a sequel was quickly underway.
The film kicks off to a strong opening. Featuring the city of Detroit in a state of chaos while the police force strikes yet again….or maybe it’s the same strike from the end of the first film. I’m not sure because the film isn’t clear on how long after the events of the first movie this one is. Anyways in his typical badass fashion Robocop busts up a drug operation and stops an armed robbery.
Afterwards the audience learns what is really going on. Robocop has been cracking down on the selling of a dangerous fictional drug called Nuke, manufactured by the lead villain Cain. Meanwhile OCP is back to their douchebag routines as they attempt to create an all new Robocop while scamming to foreclose all of Detroit due to debt.
This is the part that kind of confuses me. The film makes it clear that OCP is the one that deliberately created the Police Strike, wanting to create more chaos and cause the city to give into their demands. In fact they even go out of their way to mess up Robocop #1 so he cannot do his job…..so why are they trying to create a new Robocop if they aren’t even using the first one?
Maybe they are just put him in storage for later mass production. I don’t know, I can only make guess. But on the surface they seem to be two conflicting schemes that don’t intersect very well. The person heading this seemingly pointless operation is a woman by the name of Dr. Faxx, who thinks a new Robocop is perfect for a psychopath, and begins to obsess using the villainous Cain for her new robot model. This all builds into the predictable showdown between the super powered cyborgs.
Peter Weller returns in the lead role as Robocop. He is as good as ever and they add to his character well in the beginning, building on his loss of humanity as he deals with facing his past wife, who is suing OCP because he keeps driving past her house. It does a great job in what little it has. Fortunately all this character building crap had to be sacrificed for some stellar slapstick scenes (<- Please note sarcasm).
So the concept is solid, and on the surface the plot sounds pretty good (or on paper at least). So where did it all go wrong? Well the first stupid mistake was by bringing a kid into the mix. It’s pretty bad when one of the main villains is a wanna-be Artemis Fowl. The kid’s performance is underwhelming and I’m not even sure why he is so high up in the ranks of the drug dealers.
The film also dips into a lot of slapstick territory, especially when OCP reprograms Robocop to meet social demands for him to be more “child friendly” and “socially acceptable”. This causes the entire middle of the film to turn into a big comedy act and the film loses any sincerity at that point. It becomes a cartoon.
I mentioned acting before with the little kid, but the sad part was he really wasn’t the worst of it. The entire film is filled with K list actors. Only the returning characters from the previous film really gave good performances.
Then lastly the horrible stop motion effects also drug this film down. Whenever stop motion wasn’t involved, the film looked as great as the original. But the original limited the stop motion giant robots to about two to three minute long scenes. When your main villain is a three foot tall model robot on a studio table, it created problems. The stop motion just didn't mesh well with the gritty world they created. The climatic battle was especially clumsily and I felt as if I had been dropped into a Wallace and Gromit film.
Overall Robocop 2 is far from awful, but it is a classic example of a film with sequel syndrome going on. It’s got a lot more action going on but less plot. It was good too see Robocop back in action but in the end the laziness of the script, the poor acting, and the silly effects took it down just too many pegs for it too recover fully from.
FINAL RATING: 5/10- (50%)
NOTE: polls used later in ranking PLEASE VOTE if you have seen it.