RoboCop is probably my favorite movie of all time and I've always enjoyed watching RoboCop 2. I haven't seen RoboCop 3 since I saw it in theaters back in 1993, mostly because RoboCop 3 was the first movie I ever went to a theater to see that I walked away disappointed from. I had literally nothing better to do a few days ago, so I decided to start up RoboCop 3 on Netflix just to see if my opinion of the movie has changed at all in 22 years.
Nope, this movie is still awful.
For those of you who haven't seen RoboCop 3, let me give you the basic rundown of the plot. OCP is finally starting the Delta City project that's alluded to in the two previous movies and are trying to kick Detroit citizens out of their homes in order to get going. In order to do this, OCP hires mercenaries to act as eviction officers and dubs them "The Rehabs" despite the fact that they do absolutely nothing that would warrant a name invoking rehabilitation. OCP is also apparently struggling for money and if they don't clear out a section of Detroit by a fixed date then OCP will basically go bankrupt, so a group of rebels decide to try and hold out in that area of Detroit for a few days in order to provoke OCP's demise. Oh and OCP also got bought out / taken over by a Japanese company, but this is a pretty unimportant section of plot that only really serves to give RoboCop a robotic adversary to fight.
RoboCop tries to keep doing his police officer duties and long story short he ends up getting caught in a position where he's forced to either help The Rehabs (which are OCP officers that he technically cant oppose) or protect innocent civilians he knows will be hurt (and he cant let that happen due to his prime directives). RoboCop ends up "going rogue" in order to protect them.
The first thing I noticed was that the movie looked cheap. Something about a lot of the sets just felt like it was lacking the same level of detail that RoboCop and RoboCop 2 had (which is odd considering RoboCop 3 had a bigger budget than the original). Some of the sets just feel "made for TV" like the OCP headquarters and the Rehab staging center, they look cheap as hell. Plus I don't know if the director decided to go with a new set of cameras or different film type, but everything visually just looks off.
Another thing I noticed pretty quickly was that there was very little cast carry-over from the previous movie, and the actors who do show up in this movie are in fairly reduced roles. Officer Lewis shows up in this movie again but is promptly killed off in the first act. Sergeant Reed is back and doesn't do much but eyeroll at OCP until the finale of the movie. One of the MediaBreak anchors is back but that's only for two scenes. Murphy's wife is back in a flashback despite the character seemingly being written out in the last movie. And the OCP Johnson character is back but his role feels reduced too. Other than these few people it's an entirely new cast full of people I don't really care about. The OCP CEO known as the "Old Man" is also completely written out of this movie for some reason, which strikes me as odd since he was pretty much the main bad guy and driving force behind OCP in RoboCop 2.
Oh, and did I mention that a different guy is playing RoboCop in this movie? Peter Weller (Robo/Murphy from the last two movies) opted to do a different movie instead of RoboCop 3, which should have been a giant red flag to the studio that the movie is shit when Peter "most people only know me as RoboCop" Weller wouldn't return for a payday. RoboCop 3 pretty much establishes that Peter Weller is the MVP of the franchise, because the actor who replaces him, Robert John Burke, (while probably giving his best effort) is a clear step down. Weller's RoboCop felt like a believable cyborg and did a lot of subtle actions that really made the character. Burke's RoboCop feels like an actor in a suit; all of the subtle actions of Weller are gone, his movements as Robo are very stiff and lack fluidity between each movement, Burke delivers all of his lines in an overly robotic tone. Now I know you'll probably raise an eyebrow at me complaining about an actor delivering robotic lines for a character named RoboCop, but it's another one of those "Weller did it better" things. Weller's RoboCop lines were mostly monotone but beyond that he still spoke fairly human. Burke, meanwhile, over articulates every word and puts William Shatner-like unnecessary pauses in all of his sentences. It ends up making Weller's version more of a believable cyborg while Burke feels like an 8 year old playing robot.
There's also some really weird continuity issues with RoboCop 3. Murphy apparently is still haunted by his execution by Clarence Boddicker despite seemingly being over it by the finale of the original movie and no flashbacks occurring in RoboCop 2. He still has dreams about his wife despite RoboCop 2 establishing that Murphy needs to move on from his wife since he can't really be a husband anymore, and he tells his wife to move on. And Murphy has all of his prime directives back in RoboCop 3 despite all of his prime directives being wiped out from his memory in RoboCop 2, which is a pretty big thing to overlook. Even Murphy's 4th prime directive where he can't oppose an OCP officer somehow comes back, which was only put in place because Dick Jones was pissed off at the guy who made RoboCop.
Remember that Japanese company buying OCP thing I told you about before? RoboCop fights Samurai/Ninja Robots in this movie. Yes, they do all of the typical movie ninja shit like flipping around and being really fast and using comically sharp katanas. Robo should be completely boned in this fight, right? Yeah, the first fight plays out with the NinjaBot completely owning Robo, but then the NinjaBot for some reason decides to do a ton of pointless sword twirling bullshit that conveniently gives RoboCop enough time to roll over and attack his machine gun arm and win the fight (yeah, RoboCop gets a machine gun/bazooka attachment, it's stupid). Then near the finale of the movie he fights two of those NinjaBots and the only reason he survives is because some kid remote hacks the two robots (!) and causes them to cut each others heads off.
The one thing you probably know about this movie is that RoboCop gets a jetpack during it. Yeah, it's stupid. The green screen stuff they do for it is some of the worst green screening I've seen for any movie made from after 1990.
Some other random stuff that was really stupid in this movie
- Movie is now PG-13.
- CHILD. ACTOR. AS. MAIN. CHARACTER.
- RoboCop midway through the movie is crippled by a single grenade to the chest. RoboCop survived falling off a fucking skyscraper in the previous movie and walked away without a scratch, what the hell is this?
- The name of the OCP scientist who handles all of RoboCop's repairs and ends up saving RoboCop's life after said grenade-to-the-chest incident is named Dr. Lazarus. Come on, you couldn't be any more clever with naming your characters that?
- After Lewis dies RoboCop has weird ass dreams where he starts confusing his wife for Lewis and then for Dr Lazarus. It seems like it implie
- Rip Torn (from Men in Black) plays the OCP CEO who replaces the Old Man character. His character is terrible because he's a complete bumbling idiot who isn't even remotely believable in that job. I miss the slimy OCP executives from the last two movies were were douchebags that were still terrifyingly good at their jobs.
- Those NinjaRobots in the finale are rigged to explode and the main bad guys says the explosion will destroy everything within 20 yards. RoboCop flies out of the building on his stupid jetpack and the explosion ends up leveling the entire OCP tower. That's a lot more than 20 yards.
