RoboCop 2

RoboCop 2; science-fiction/ action, USA, 1990; D: Irvin Kershner, S: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Daniel O'Herlihy, Tom Noonan, Gabriel Damon, Belinda Bauer, John Glover

Despite the fact that mega corporation OCP managed to make RoboCop, the big crime rate is still present in Detroit. One of the main troublemakers is criminal Cain who sells deadly drug "Nuke", assisted by his girlfriend, Angie, and a 10-year old boy, Hob. RoboCop wants to stop him, but gets demolished into pieces by a electromagnet. Still, OCP manages to reassemble him, much to the pleasure of his police colleague Lewis. But OCP takes Cain's brain and places it into RoboCop 2, a 15 foot tall robot that should replace RoboCop and fight crime more efficiently. Still, RoboCop 2 goes amok, killing people, so RoboCop confronts him in the OCP headquarters. After a fierce fight, RoboCop manages to pull out Cain's brain from the robot and destroy it.

Frank Miller, before his huge success with "Sin City", experienced a big setback and disappointment when his screenplay for "RoboCop 2" was completely changed by the producers, which is a pity considering author's wishes and concepts should be respected, and not egoistically and rudely ignored. The final result is a sequel that's definitely worse than the rather fascinating low budget "RoboCop", even though it looks more "modern" - even Robo's mechanic suit is blue, in contrast with the original gray color from the first film. The main problem is that the crew behind the film forcefully tried to imitate the first film - but all the wrong elements, like violence and gore, which resulted in mean spirited and dumbing violence that's just there because they thought it "should be there" due to "immoral is cool" attitude - instead of adressing also more subtle, satirical and dramatic touches, which were much more interesting in the first film. Just take the swearing of the 10-year old boy protagonist Hob or the tasteless TV commercial with the blue skin creme against Sun's radiation. Or how else to explain the fact that one crucial scene, the one where RoboCop visits his own grave, was edited out of the film?

Still, as a whole, this is still a very solid sequel and critics were really too harsh towards it (it's average rating at Rotten-tomatoes.com is only 4.5/10) since the first 20 minutes (TV news that report about a nuclear power plant in the Amazon rain forest) and the last 20 minutes (spectacular, meticulously crated fight between RoboCop and the 15 foot tall evil robot - set in the scene with the help of stop-motion animation - from the OCP building up to the street) of the film are quite impressive. If it didn't have dumbing violence, trashy tone, completely unnecessary child as a criminal and if at least the main character RoboCop was at least developed a little bit instead of getting degraded into an supporting character, "RoboCop 2" would have been more than just a cult "guilty pleasure". Remakes are usually unnecessary, but if there was ever an opportunity for Miller to re-film his own, original script, then it would have been more than understandable if he did.

Grade:+