Viking Night: Robocop 2
By Bruce Hall
April 19, 2017
BoxOfficeProphets.com
RoboCop was my new hero, and he didn’t wear his underwear on the outside like some of the guys he replaced. Instead of looking like a lost member of the Village People, RoboCop was the gleaming god of face punching, neck snapping, city block-exploding justice. So, when a sequel was released in 1990, I was down with it. Had you offered me a golden Ferrari that both ran on AND dispensed champagne, I’d have simply had no time for you. RoboCop 2 was a moral imperative, and had wolves attacked me on the way to the theater, I’d have shown up at the theater with a pet wolf.
Nothing was going to keep me from this movie. What can I say? I was young. Those were my priorities.
Sadly, things did not go as expected. I trust you are already aware of RoboCop 2’s reputation as a murderer of childhoods. And if you’re not, please believe me when I say that this movie disappointed me in the same way I’d disappoint the world if I ever got my hands on that magical Ferrari. So why include RoboCop 2 in the same rarefied air as the original? Why bother adding it to the hallowed pantheon of cinematic excellence that is the Viking Night film vault?
The answer is that for exactly half its running time, RoboCop 2 is nearly - not quite, but nearly - as good as the original. And then, as if someone threw a switch, it aggressively becomes the opposite of that.
And that is worth talking about.
Initially, RoboCop 2 gamely mimics the grim, satirical tone of the original. This is a world where anyone lacking a conscience can purchase a rifle capable of exploding cars. Hookers will stab you in the face for a half-eaten cheeseburger. And, the police are on strike. Thanks to all this, and a new super drug called Nuke, near-future Detroit remains a bleak, crime-ridden hellscape. Without police, the government has failed to confront the Nuke problem, prompting the corporate sleazebags at Omni Consumer Products to step in. Because something-something evil, they have Detroit’s mayor (Willard E Pugh, whose performance makes Chris Tucker look like Sidney Poitier) over a financial barrel, and are calling in all their loans to the City.
Yes, the police were on strike in the first movie. Yes, the same wildly corrupt corporation from before is still running things, and is still wildly corrupt. They also still control the police department, and they also keep the lights on in the lab where RoboCop (Peter Weller) gets his screws tightened. I seem to recall most of these things getting resolved at the end of the first movie, but you’d never know it from watching the sequel. Everything is right back to the way it was before, because like its namesake, RoboCop 2 immediately succumbs to the Prime Directives of bad sequels:
1. For no logical reason, nullify the events of the first film
2. Hit the same beats, but not hard enough to make it matter
3. Murder Bruce’s Childhood? Y, N
Unfortunately, this means we never get to see RoboCop do anything as clever as that time he shot a rapist in the balls. But there are several competently composed sequences wherein he blows many things up, and throws lots of people through brick walls and glass panels. It’s glorious if uninspired mayhem. And then we discover that the former officer Alex Murphy is having trouble adjusting emotionally to being a cyborg.
That’s right. We get to see him repeat the same arc two films in a row, a-la Chris Pine’s bitch-version of Captain Kirk.
The original RoboCop was the story of a dedicated, family-oriented cop who was murdered, brought back as a cyborg, and given the chance to hunt down his own killers. It was essentially a dime store Western, told in a way that invited an accompaniment of heavy metal guitar licks. But the story also devoted a little - and only JUST a little - time to the question of how this might affect someone on a human level. At some point in every RoboCop movie, we’re reminded that our hero is nothing more than a few chunks of meat inside that armor.
His time is never his own, and the people who built him speak to him not as a dog (which might be welcome), but as an appliance. Inside that sweet-ass battle chassis is a very human brain, containing everything that defines Alex Murphy. And he would gladly trade the ability to rip off car doors and never run out of ammunition for the ability to go back home to his family. There is a scene in the first film where he visits his former home, aware of his past life but burdened by his inability connect with it. It is in this light that the character of RoboCop has always interested me.
Now obviously, few things delight me more than an emotionally unstable policebot, pounding on murderers and rapists with his vengeful titanium fists. But the real story of RoboCop is (what’s left of) the man inside the suit, and how he feels about being inside it. So, in that respect, RoboCop 2 is reheating old food, but I would argue that Murphy's personal struggles receive a little more attention this time around. I found myself very interested in something that in my opinion, the first movie didn’t explore quite deeply enough.
It’s a sad, lonely life for Murphy, and the closest we see him come to true human contact is as he holds the hand of a dying criminal late in the film. Murphy is clearly contemplating the process of violent death, with which he is all too familiar. And Weller does all he can to robo-emote from beneath 60 pounds of plastic and rubber. Yes, the scene wanders dangerously close to hokum, but it’s always kind of worked for me. The pain in Weller’s voice is palpable, and you can almost hear him lamenting the irony of a resurrected man again made helpless in the face of death.
No, it’s not Oscar material. But I appreciated the effort anyway.
And then everything falls apart, literally disintegrating in midair like a ghost flight over the Bermuda Triangle. What begins as an inferior-but-still-successful sequel becomes, at a clearly definable point, the Never Say Never Again of robotic cop movies. It is a pale imitation that wanders into a few of the right beats, ticks some of the right boxes, but by virtue of its structure, fails to capture what it clearly wants to claim.
This is not surprising since Irvin Kershner, the director of RoboCop 2, was also responsible for what remains the saddest of all Bond films. And let’s not forget his work on The Empire Strikes Back, widely regarded as “the best Star Wars movie” by people who have not seen it since they were ten and have therefore forgotten that it makes no fucking sense. None of these films work well in my opinion, with RoboCop 2 being both the worst offender, and the biggest disappointment.
So, at what I like to call the “kill point”, the movie abruptly abandons all the emotional steam it’s worked so hard to build, and fully embraces being a pointless rehash of the original. Of course, this time, we get to see RoboCop handle a Harley-Davidson. And while he only figuratively jumps a shark with it, he also rides the front of a box truck like T.J. Hooker. And of course, he eventually gets into another destructive (and increasingly pointless) series of fistfights with another, bigger robot.
As a kid, I remember being impressed by all of this. But at the time I also proudly owned multiple pairs of Zubaz. There’s just no accounting for taste, which is why I can hear a cocaine-fueled studio executive asking, halfway through the production:
“There’s not enough action. Can we make him do karate or something?”
It’s not that I don’t welcome RoboCop on a motorcycle (when they gave him one in the 2014 remake, I felt it was way overdue). It’s just that for a whole one-and-a-half films, RoboCop was not particularly nimble, and moved like a marionette with gout. The most adroit thing I’d ever seen him accomplish was spinning his gun on his finger and even then, he looked like he was about to drop it. But then, without warning, out of nowhere, there he was, doing stunts on a Hog, like Steve McQueen in plate mail.
Sorry, but you can’t just bust out a previously undisclosed ability in the middle of the third act. Do you remember how, in The Phantom Menace, R2D2 could...apparently...fly? In a film that took place before the original trilogy, in which he frequently bumped into walls and had trouble rolling over small rocks?
Yeah. That’s why you don’t do that. It’s crap storytelling, and it murders childhoods.
And while I could forgive the low-budget look of the original RoboCop (Red Forman getting stabbed in the neck by a robot can overcome many things), I have no such mercy for the sequel. It’s clear that someone’s ambition was greater than their budget, and the result wasn’t exactly easy on the eyes even back in 1990. The astute among us will also note that composer Basil Poledouris is inexplicably gone, as is his iconic music. In its place is a baleful morass that sounds like they couldn't get the rights to the original score, so they lifted something from a canceled Chuck Norris picture.
This saddens me. It's like, I don't know, having to make a Bond movie without the theme music.
In fact, the only things about RoboCop 2 that don’t feel like a morbid imitation are Peter Weller and Nancy Allen, although it’s not because I think the Academy needs to go back and smelt any new trophies. It’s just that Weller’s take on this character fascinates me, and I appreciate how his doughy, adorable partner is never reduced to victim status by virtue of her gender OR huggability. If you don’t count her lack of tractor strength, combat armor and night vision, she remains every bit Murphy’s equal.
The only other character I care to note is Hob (Gabriel Damon), a 12-year-old member of the Nuke gang who takes over when RoboCop breaks their leader (Tom Noonan) in half like a road flare. Like his boss, Hob is a sadistic, brutally violent psychopath. But he’s also a child, and at times he seems to have trouble absorbing the madness happening around him. It’s jarring to see a kid the size of a Segway swearing like a longshoreman as he gleefully condemns his enemies to death by bloody chunks.
Many critics at the time were appalled (Ebert vomited continuously for a week, as I recall), and I can sympathize with their reasoning. But not only does Damon weirdly turn in the most interesting performance of the film, it bears mentioning that kids like Hob do exist. If you don’t believe me, book a flight to Sierra Leone, or wherever there’s still an airport in El Salvador (or, certain parts of Oakland). The point is, we can argue over whether it was appropriate to include such a character in a silly movie like this, but that discussion would only prove what an abject failure the rest of the story (co-written by Frank Miller who, as you can see, does make mistakes) truly is.
Hob is a red herring. The real crime of RoboCop 2 is the way it squanders a terrific head of narrative steam, ecstatically rubs your face in it, pats itself on the back and then drops the mic as though it accomplished something. The unmitigated gall of it infuriates me, but it’s only because - derivative or not - the story it started out telling was GOING somewhere before being unceremoniously jettisoned, like whatever probably happens when RoboCop goes to the bathroom.
It’s crap storytelling, and it murders childhoods.