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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.

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