RoboCop 2 (1990)

When it was released in the summer of 1987, RoboCop was warmly received by both audiences and critics. The movie still holds up nearly thirty years after its release, a testament to just how good it is. And because of its success, it's natural that Hollywood would want to capitalize on it. While the movie inspired a short-lived Saturday morning cartoon in 1988 and some comic books and video games, there was no true successor until MGM released RoboCop 2 in 1990. You'd think the movie would turn out relatively okay, since it has some talented names attached as writer and director. But I guess the original's shoes were too big to fill because this sequel didn't come anywhere near matching its success.

Things haven't exactly gotten any better since we last left Detroit. The city is dangerously close to going bankrupt thanks to the continued machinations of the unscrupulous mega-corporation OCP. A full economic collapse would allow OCP to foreclose upon the city and thus control Detroit's government, allowing them to further pursue the "Delta City" plans they'd proposed in the first movie. To help accomplish this, OCP forces the police to strike by drastically cutting their salaries and pensions. And a police strike means that the streets of Detroit have quickly descended into pure lawless anarchy.

Very few cops are still on regular duty, the most notable one being RoboCop (Peter Weller), who continues his war against crime with the assistance of his partner Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen). But the growing opinion within OCP is that RoboCop is becoming obsolete, and that a more advanced model should be patrolling the streets of Detroit. Their attempts at creating a "RoboCop 2," however, are continually met with disaster when each candidate freaks out and commits suicide upon their activation. Things quickly change when Dr. Juliette Faxx (Belinda Bauer), an amoral psychologist under OCP's employ, takes over the program and gets the idea that they'd gotten lucky with Alex Murphy's transformation into RoboCop. If turning another police officer into RoboCop 2 won't work, then maybe someone with megalomaniacal tendencies could.

And much like with Murphy's death in the first movie, an opportunity quickly presents itself. RoboCop has been investigating the source of a new designer narcotic called "Nuke," following a trail of clues to a factory owned by Cain (Tom Noonan), a drug lord with a messianic complex. His first attempt at apprehending Cain is less than fruitful, as RoboCop is quickly outnumbered, defeated, and literally torn to pieces. OCP rebuilds him, and being quite the obtrusive bureaucrat, Dr. Faxx neuters him by adding over three hundred conflicting orders to his programming, making him more family friendly and politically correct, thus rendering him completely incapable of combating Detroit's violent criminals.

But a distraught RoboCop manages to reset his programming to its original settings, allowing him to go after Cain a second time arrest him, significantly injuring him in the process. Seizing the opportunity, Dr. Faxx switches off Cain's life support and claims his body for the RoboCop 2 program. The end result is a hulking mechanical monstrosity that's more ED-209 than RoboCop, fueled by Nuke and controlled by the mind of a psychopath. So of course, "RoboCain" ends up running amok and it's up to the original RoboCop to bring him down.

RoboCop 2 is the kind of sequel that makes you think the producers had only read the Cliff's Notes of the original movie. You get the feeling that the producers were given a list of all the things people liked about the first movie and decided they would just copy them without thinking what made them so good in the first place. The whole thing is one of the purest examples of a sequel that was made to cash in on its progenitor's success without caring about the quality of their own movie. It was a cash grab, pure and simple. There wasn't any desire to continue the story or further develop the Murphy/RoboCop dichotomy, just some studio executives wanting to make a little money with a name people recognized and liked.

The movie was the final film directed by the late Irvin Kershner, who had previously found success with The Empire Strikes Back and the James Bond movie Never Say Never Again. Part of why the first movie worked was because of Paul Verhoeven's over-the-top sensibilities adding to the movie's dark sense of humor, but because he was off making Total Recall at the time, he was unable to direct RoboCop 2 and as such it lacks the sarcastic tone he brought to the first movie. Kershner creates some fine moments here, but it's tonally inconsistent. The movie tries doing a hundred different things at once in an attempt to replicate the original's formula for success, with Kershner being stuck trying to put it all together into something that makes sense. But the end result is a movie that's all over the place. It veers wildly from clichéd early-‘90s action movie to dumb comedy, stopping once in a while to throw in a brief amount of poorly-handled moody existentialism and the occasional dig at politics. Kershner could only do so much with what he was given, though I will say that he at least tried his hardest. Sometimes, you have to take what you can get.

Even the special effects have their ups and downs. The sequel follows in the original's footsteps by using stop-motion miniatures to represent Cain's new robotic body, but something about it feels off. The stop-motion effects never really blend in with the rest of the scenes they appear in. They never feel like they really co-exist with the actors, a situation that ranges from mildly bothersome to painfully obvious to the point of being distracting depending on what scenes you're watching. Could times have changed so much in the three years between RoboCop and RoboCop 2 that the special effects could look outdated? How do you take such a step backwards in such a short amount of time? Was it a budget problem? Was it some kind of hiccup in the creative process?

The movie also suffers from a lackluster script as well. Comic book legend Frank Miller had originally been hired to write the movie following the success of his now-classic Batman tale The Dark Knight Returns, but his script quickly went through numerous rewrites after studio executives decided they weren't happy with it. The final result, credited to Miller and Walon Green, ends up being a jumbled mess of undercooked ideas and half-hearted attempts at catching lighting in a bottle a second time.

For starters, the script introduces some interesting subplots only to resolve them almost immediately without developing them like they could have been. One sees RoboCop apparently return to his existential "man vs. machine" crisis from the early parts of the first movie, practically stalking Alex Murphy's widow and son, longing to reconnect with them. The subplot is admittedly an intriguing one, one that I was actually happy to see revisited in the new RoboCop remake, but I've got some problems with it. Part of it seems like RoboCop is back to the way he was when he was first introduced in the first movie, using a monotone voice and a more stiff demeanor. By the end of Verhoeven's originalm RoboCop had reclaimed his humanity and his "Alex Murphy" identity had come shining through his programming, so why this step backwards? And why bring up the whole "RoboCop stalks the Murphys" thing at all if you were going to wrap it up as quickly as possible and not do anything worthwhile with it?

The same goes for the other subplot where Dr. Faxx reprograms RoboCop with all those nonsensical directives. The idea doesn't go anywhere or contribute anything to the movie (to the point that I could have easily left it out of the earlier plot synopsis and not missed it at all), and it is resolved so quickly I wondered why they even brought it up at all. RoboCop being turned into an ultra-PC goody-two-shoes by focus groups and meddling corporate executives could have made for a fantastic satire of Hollywood action movies if there had been stronger writing.

And while I'm here, I might as well talk about what some consider the movie's most controversial aspect, its depiction of children. Every child you see in this movie is just as evil as the adult criminals you see. Had it been constrained to just the one scene where the Little League team robs an electronics store, it could have been passed off as a joke and would have been actually pretty funny. But instead we also have the character Hob, who serves as Cain's second-in-command. He's trigger-happy, swears like a sailor, is as vicious as a rabid pit bull, and is also twelve years old. The fact that they had a child play this ruthless would-be drug kingpin is amazing enough, but add on top of it the movie's expectation that we're supposed to feel sympathy for this pint-sized monster when he gets his final comeuppance just because he's a kid is ludicrous. He spends the whole movie trying to kill RoboCop and Lewis, and is a general all-around asshole with no redeeming qualities that I could find, and we're supposed to feel sorry for him at the end? Yeah, no, RoboCop 2. Not gonna happen. You don't want me to pity the adult villains, so why should I pity the child villains?

Even the movie's acting is a bit of a step down from the original movie. I will confess to enjoying Willard E. Pugh's goofy performance as the beleaguered mayor of Detroit, and I thought Peter Weller once again did a fine job as RoboCop. Weller is actually pretty funny in the scenes following RoboCop's psychological neutering, but I wish he'd been given more moments where he's allowed to show that Alex Murphy still exists within that cybernetic body. There's a scene early in the movie where he realizes just how much pain he's causing his widow upon being confronted by her, and gives up on trying to reconnect with his family. While the whole subplot could have been done better, Weller plays it with a level of subtle pathos that shows that there's a human being in that suit. I wanted to see where Weller could go with that because I thought he was fantastic in these moments, but alas, it wasn't to be.

The rest of the cast is inconsistent, though. Many of them are just plain dull, to tell you the truth. RoboCop 2's villains are nowhere near as charismatic or intimidating as the originals, with Tom Noonan especially seeming disinterested in the whole thing. I also can't say I was particularly a fan of Gabriel Damon, who I felt was more annoying than anything else (though much of it has to do with his lousy character). Belinda Bauer is the worst offender though, the only member of the cast that I thought was outright awful. Damon's character might have been annoying, but at least he was watchable. Bauer, on the other hand, is absolutely dreadful in every scene she's in. After a while, I just started fast-forwarding every time she's on the screen just because I couldn't bear to watch her anymore.

RoboCop 2 was a movie I remember thinking was really cool back when I was a kid. But watching it now for the first time in several years, I can't help but notice just how flawed it is. There are moments I will say I liked, but the whole thing feels like someone singing a really bad cover song. The music might be there, but it sounds off-key. It misses everything that made the original RoboCop great, only trying to follow it on the most superficial of levels. Even when you don't compare it to the first movie, RoboCop 2 is still only mediocre at best. But as big a letdown as this one might be, there are far worse RoboCop movies out there...

Final Rating: **