RoboCop 2
This is less edgy, less gory, more silly all around. It does work as a standalone action film of politically questionable variety (like Ghostbusters), but the RoboCop baggage drags it down.
The opening scene is fantastic, it’s completely over the top crime-infested inner city thuggery. A serial escalation of criminal behaviour. Then on the film itself, the Big Bad is a drug-fuelled religious cult leader, employing a kid as the ruthless lieutenant. Their version of heroin is nuke, a red injectable liquid.
RoboCop eventually finds the source of Nuke, but the bad guys are resourceful, they have informants on the police, they trap them and dismantle them, dumping the remains on the precint. OCP won’t put it back together, for mysterious reasons, but they eventually relent and the Big Bad is caught and made comatose in a car chase. They have 500 million bucks in cash and gold ingots, but the city won’t see a dime for ages.
OCP has bad mouthed the city credit and avoid repairing RoboCop, so they will default on their police payments, which gives the company foreclosure powers over the city, privatising everything. The mayor is pissed, and does a telethon to raise money, which goes bad. The bad guys want to bail out the city, in exchange for police protection, with some valid points about their competing drugs, booze and cigarettes. OCP puts the Big Bad’s brain on a bot and ruins that deal.
Paul Verhoeven did not return, but the main cast is all there (Lewis sporting a fantastic hairdo), and the Big Bad is that weirdo from Synecdoche, New York et al. They struck gold with the kid lieutenant, he looks slick.
There are many memorable scenes, but my favourite is when RoboCop is programmed by the psychologist to be nice, and an entire team of kids in baseball uniforms are robbing a hardware store. He just gives them a pep talk, scolds them for swearing, and is about to lecture on nutrition before they scram.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.