RoboCop 2 Movie Review

George Orwell has to be turning over in his grave. Current political climate aside, something within Orwell just has to be annoyed at the endless procession of utterly stupid dystopia chic. The massive flow of filmmakers that have turned out sad sci-fi epics with worlds think they are honoring Orwell but instead are making a mockery of him.

RoboCop 2 is one of those grave-turners.

In the world of RoboCop 2, your biggest worry is a cigarette look-alike called “Nuke,” the cops are on strike, and Detroit can be bought and sold for a few hundred million. Oh yeah, and the only person left to depend on is a robotic scab.

You have to wonder if the team behind RoboCop has any clue where the top is, let alone how far over it they’ve gone.

As far as the flimsy piece of twine that attempts to hold RoboCop 2 together and call it a plot, it sits as this: Life in Detroit sucks. The cops are on strike and the only one still working is the cyborg RoboCop (Peter Weller) and his perpetual bad-hair-day partner, Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen). On the side of the bad guys there’s religious drug zealot Cain (Tom Noonan, and score one for cheap Biblical references), a man who looks like Timothy Leary during a violent flashback. There’s also Hob (Gabriel Damon), a kid on the fast track to being the next CEO of Enron, and Dr. Faxx (Belinda Bauer), a psychologist obsessed with making a better, more people friendly RoboCop and a more violent RoboCop 2 (why do bad action movies always have to have some stupid reference to their name in the actual narrative?). The rest of the movie shows a battle between the cops and the corporation so filled with contradictions and stupidity that it’s utterly worthless to watch – although it is the first time that “The Man” has fought “The Man” in movies.

I really hate to bring the intellectual brain to the table with RoboCop 2, but it’s the type of movie that will only make enough sense to enjoy if you have recently had a stroke or if you believe in absolutely no ideas. Short of that it’s just a badly scripted mess that feels like a gang-rape of Orwellian ideas, an excuse to make a buck while decrying an evil company’s endless favoring of making a buck over doing the right thing.

But hey, at least now even the most idiotic person can claim to have seen a good example of irony in action.

The new RoboCop box set offers all three films with copious extras. The original is an extended version of the film (you won't notice any extra scenes), plus a commentary track, deleted scenes, and several making of featurettes. The sequels get less attention (and rightly so), but it's still an awfully nice collection of DVDs, packaged in a nifty multi-folded box. I'd buy that for a dollar!