RoboCop 2

Now we come to “RoboCop 2,” released in 1990, which is a strange combination of violence and humor. You could say that this film has a split personality, first showing gruesome scenes and then moving ahead as if that part didn’t mean anything. This is a movie where one part shows a tycoon announcing his plan to “take Detroit private,” and another part shows RoboCop taking the brains of his enemy out of their artificial head and smashes them into the pavement. The movie’s strategy is to switch the laughs and the gore, so that right after the brains are smashed, there’s a line of funny dialogue.

Apart from everything else, the very idea of RoboCop is funny, which as the late Roger Ebert put it: “There's a human tendency to be amused by anything that seems to be intelligent but is actually governed by laws of behavior it doesn't understand. That's why we like plastic teeth that chatter when we wind them up, and stupid pet tricks. RoboCop is a creature like that: An incredibly expensive, complicated piece of machinery and computer circuits that stomps around Detroit making all of the wrong decisions.”

The story begins this time with Detroit at a moment where it looks in even worse shape than at the end of the first movie. There’s a citywide police strike, in protest of pay cuts thought up by the evil Omni Consumer Products Company, a massive company that was to replace cops with RoboCops and take over Detroit in the process. OCP’s CEO is the Old Man, played by Daniel O’Herlihy, a magnate, who Ebert says, “whose vision would make Mike Milliken envious.” He’ll force the city into bankruptcy, take it over at a good deal price, and strip it of its property.

This plot doesn’t really have much to do with the main quarrel in “RoboCop 2,” which is between Cain, played by Tom Noonan, the inventor of a popular new drug, and the forces of justice represented by RoboCop, reprised by Peter Weller. Cain’s sidekicks include a violent, foul-mouthed young boy, played by Gabriel Damon, who looks like he is around the age of 12 but kills people without shame, Ebert says he “swears like Eddie Murphy,” and eventually takes over the drug business. Ebert says in his review, “I hesitate to suggest the vicious little tyke has been shoehorned into this R-rated movie so that the kiddies will have someone to identify with when they see it on video, but stranger things have happened.”

The movie’s screenplay is a confusion of half-baked and unfinished ideas. The most distracting loose end is the idea that Murphy, the cop whose cyborg part has been recycled into RoboCop, may still be human after all. He acts like he is – driving past his house to look at his wife like he wants to return to her – but then they reprogram him so that he knows that he is only a machine. The way he says that makes us suspect that he’s trying to mess around with his programmers, but then the whole plot thread is taken out and we never find out if he’s really human or not.

Then there’s the question of who makes a good RoboCop. After the first success of the original model one prototype RoboCop after another self-destructs. They get suicidal, according to the scientists in the movie, because they do not have the strength for a sense of duty. That’s why Murphy’s character made such a good RoboCop. Since each RoboCop costs possibly millions to develop, the corporation can’t waste all of that money on doubtful material.

Alright, but then why do they decide to turn Cain, a drug dealer, into a robot? He’s completely high on the drugs all of the time, but they rob him of his brain and put it in a big, mean robot for no apparent reason, but Ebert speculates that they could have a new cyborg for RoboCop to go up against in the finale. Ebert mentions, “The bad robot has a head that looks like a Nazi helmet; did its inventors know they were manufacturing a villain?” The finale dialogue of the movie tells untold thousands of machine-gun bullets, most of them fired at the bad robot despite the fact that it’s clearly resistant to bullets. The evil little tyke gets a tender deathbed scene, no doubt out of respect to his tender years. The magnate and his strategists get the idea of putting the entire blame on the female scientist, played by Belinda Bauer, but the movie ends before they can.

And we never find out if RoboCop has true human feelings or not. What a way to leave the audiences who loved the first one and wanted to figure that out in this one. Dimwits!

You know what, we don’t really see RoboCop that much in this movie, because Ebert suggested that he “rebelled against the inhuman ordeal of wearing that heavy metal suit any longer than necessary.” What we do see are a handful of violent moments and action, lots of dialogue from the minor characters that doesn’t pay off, and so many humorous TV ads for the world of the future. The ads are funny – especially the one that opens the movie. You know the recurring “I’ll buy that for a dollar” one. Ebert said, “I didn't much like "RoboCop 2" (the use of that killer child is beneath contempt), but I've gotta hand it to them: It's strange how funny it is, for a movie so bad. Or how bad, for a movie so funny.” I have to agree with him, because I wasn’t satisfied with this movie because not everything was resolved by the end.

In the end, I would say that “RoboCop 2” deserves a 5. Now hold on to your seats because next week will be the movie that was responsible for killing off this character for a long time, “RoboCop 3.”