I'd buy this for a dollar! Maybe not much more than that though.
Continuing our look at Mildly Contested Sequels after finally getting beyond Thunderdome (forgive me), now let's take a gander at the sequel to one of the most iconic symbols of satirical eighties scifi. Paul Verhoeven's Robocop is one that's held up remarkably well--oh sure, the suits and tech are all charmingly of the Reagan years, but the very blunt take on corporate meddling into public services and more is one that still resonates, and was pretty daring for the time. It was gory, it was hilarious, and it struck that right balance of satire and serious character-based storytelling, as Detroit police officer Murphy (Peter Weller) is transformed into the titular company-owned cyborg after being gunned down on the job, struggling with his identity after being turned into essentially property.
Naturally, it did well, and a sequel was soon to follow, overseen by Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner. Verhoeven was off to work on the even more hilarious Total Recall, which we'll get to soon, and for script duties, we got a certain comic book writer by the name of Frank Miller.
Miller...is an interesting one to say the least. He's certainly influential--in the eighties, he reinvented the character of Daredevil into the one we know today, and also codified our modern vision of Batman, with the story The Dark Knight Returns. A big influence on Burton's Batman, this was the book alongside Alan Moore's Watchmen that bought along the trends of dark and gritty storytelling in comics that eventually spiralled into unintentional self-parody in the nineties (and to some extent now, but let's not get too distracted). Still--all you have to know is that he was a big deal for the world of sequential art then, also later penning things you might've heard of like 300 and Sin City.
However, Miller was never exactly subtle, even in his prime. His work was rife with ultraviolence, larger than life characters, and enough nods to Taxi Driver to make Sorcese's head fall off. It sounds like a right fit for something to follow up on Robocop, but here's the thing--rarely was Miller able to balance things with genuine humanization. Oh, he did it on occasion, like in Batman Year One (my personal favorite of his), but as time went on, he just fell back on the Sin City style of everyone resolving everything by clobbering, shooting, or shooting with clobbering. Eventually, he went off the edge around the 2000s, giving us badly drawn and horrendously plotted reactionary crap like Holy Terror (and the less said about that the better).
Now, with that diversion out of the way, we at least have an idea of why RoboCop 2 is somewhat contested. So, without further ado, onto the film--dead or alive, it's coming with me.
Straight away we have the tone set with a look at the crime wave of absurd violence sweeping Detroit, with muggings every four feet, corruption abounding, and little kids peddling brand new drugs! I won't make a joke about the real Detroit because for one you probably already have. The city itself is in severe debt to the megacorporation OCP, which in the original film was depicted as being torn between the competing interests of its own members--here, they're just all cartoonishly evil and greedy like Weyland Yutani, with not much else to it.
Robocop himself is back to a monotone-voiced hardass cyborg after his development in the first film--in fact, that's the biggest flaw we have here. You really felt for Murphy in the original as he struggled underneath the layers of programming and cybernetics placed over him by his corporate masters, as he revisits his abandoned family home to find something to cling on to. Miller, of course, has to write him as the same rather simplistic mechanized badass, with most protagonist characterization going to his sidekick Officer Lewis (Nancy Allen).
Anyway, most of the plot is related to the dealings related to the drug gang lead by a messianic addict called Cain (Tom Noonan), with his inexplicably prepubescent lieutenant Hob (Gabriel Damon). There's a few scenes were Robocop struggles to try and arrest Hob due to his age, because apparently he can't conceive of a way to apprehend a criminal without ventilating them. The film as a whole is slightly confused if Hob is meant to be a tragic figure roped into a life of crime, or just an irredeemable little bastard.
More entertaining are the scenes with OCP. Sure, the interesting corporate politics are gone, and the Old Man in charge of the company (Dan O'Herhily) is now just a cartoonishly evil exec, but damn if he's not having fun with the role. The iconic scene in the first where the big ED-209 robot goes haywire in a corporate demonstration is repeated as OCP tries to replicate Robocop with bloody results--it's all kind of dumb, but amusing. Eventually, slightly kooky Dr. Faxx (Belinda Bauer) decides that the best replacement is taking Cain's brain and installing it in a huge heavily armed mech. BECAUSE OF COURSE. And the Old Man goes along with this because...she feeds him sushi...or something.
There's also a subplot where Robocop has hundreds of politically correct directives installed onto him, rendering him unable to function, until he deus ex machinas (pun intended) his way out of it. That's about the extent of his characterization, and yes, that is typical of Miller's satire. The first film was blunt about it too, but there was something about it that didn't go quite so cartoonishly. I guess it was just spaced out a bit better with other scenes, whereas here the silliness is more unrelenting.
However, we do step up once we get to the climax, where Cain has been installed into the Robocop 2 mech, and things go about as well as you can expect. The design of this big old mechanical tamale is pretty cool, and the stop-motion effects are reasonably effective. A big battle ensues where Robocop himself uses anti-tank rifles, throwing the mechanized Cain off the side of a building, and in general, you've got pyrotechnics, mayhem, and robot-on-robot action all over the place. I gotta say, I was entertained.
Ultimately, Robocop wins, OCP gets away, and not much has been resolved, but at least it ends on a relatively high note. Overall? It's definitely a step down, and cranks up the goofiness of the first while leaving most of the rest by the wayside. However, for the sheer absurd black comedy ridiculousness throughout, it's not a bad watch with some beer if you're in the right mood, and there's a couple action highlights.
And, well, it's not Robocop 3, which tamed everything down while making it all significantly lamer! Yes, that was the nadir of the series, which went onto a kids animated series (because that sort of thing was momentarily in vogue in the eighties, for extremely dumb reasons), a live-action show, and eventually, a rather redundant remake in 2014, which wasn't anything special to say the least, but somewhat more watchable than other pointless reboots of the time. There were vague ruminations of District 9 director Verhoeven doing his own take, but that doesn't seem to have come to much.
So yeah. Robocop 2 certainly isn't the worst of its series, and while it is pretty schlocky, it's schlock with its moments, popcorny they may be. Definitely see the first if you haven't already, and if you want more but rougher around the edges, this might not be a waste of time. You don't have to go further in the series than this however.
Next up? We'll be firing up the flux capacitor for Back to the Future 3...
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