I haven't been to see many movies lately (read: any) so I've been keeping myself busy with various video games and podcasts to occupy my time instead. Of note is a new addition called The Sequelisers: an hour-long show which attempts to rewrite bad movie sequels and make them better. I mention this because their movie this week was Robocop 2, and it occurred to me that it's been months since I saw the Robocop sequels. So I decided to rewatch them, since the original is something of a favourite of mine, and it occurred to me that the franchise as a whole has a serious problem.
This is what I have come to call the too-many-damn-kids problem, or the Robocop problem for short. Robocop 2 is the worst offender by far, but this issue leaks into the third film in a weird way that we'll come to later. The basics of the Robocop problem are: a prevalence of children in an otherwise adult-rated film, or the inclusion of a prominent child character; said inclusion leading to ineffectual villains and bloodless carnage; and whole plans seeming utterly illogical, and thus heroic victories feeling hollow or contrived or even meaningless, because the screenwriters were trying to plan this around working with kids.
So how does this affect Robocop 2? The basic plot centres around a new drug called Nuke which is sweeping the market: it's cheap, it has very few side effects, and it's highly addictive. Controlling this drug is a mysterious man called Cain, but at his right hand is a kid called Hob.
Hob is arguably the least of Robocop 2's problems: the late-eighties computer graphics, the complicated-yet-plodding storyline... there were a lot of issues with this film. But I bring up the kids because it's the most flagrant, egregious problem and getting rid of them could solve a lot of the other issues in the movie. But Hob works somehow; he's played well by Gabriel Damon, who is at least trying to act and seems to be aware of the themes within Robocop. And the story does give him some darker moments, giving us a hint at later motivations - he is forced to watch as Cain cuts open a dirty cop who betrayed the gang, and it sets up his leaving Cain for dead later. Had the angle of Murphy's family been better telegraphed throughout the film, it might have left the ending feeling more poignant and given Hob some form of redemption.
Hob is a decent, strong character, and that's enough to excuse him being a kid - although I still don't understand why Robocop can't shoot an armed kid who is actively shooting at him. No, the real culprits are far worse.
Let's go further into the story. Cain's gang takes apart Murphy and dumps him at the police strike. He's patched up, but a new focus in OCP leads to new directives for Robocop, thanks to a boardroom full of suits focus-testing the bionic bobby. These new directives leave him unable to properly fight crime - he cannot harm people, he is overwhelmed by the sheer number of instructions, many of them are likely contradictory - and it comes to a head when his partner, Officer Lewis, rounds up a posse of child looters. Instead of arresting them to bring them to justice, Robocop lectures them about their life choices.
The problems here are twofold: first, the implication that children render Robocop ineffectual; and second, that the writers justified the godawful directives thing with yet more children. They're throwaway, never seen again, and while they fit the whole ridiculous ultraviolence theme when we first meet them - tearing up a shop to loot it whilst the shopkeeper cowers, bloodied and terrorized - they stick out when they obediently line up against the wall at Lewis's behest, and they don't feel authentically part of the world. They scamper away at the instruction of some unseen director or assistant, and it feels very stilted and brings you out of the movie.
Robocop 3 is by far the worst offender of the Robocop problem, and I think the blame lies squarely on the studio, for one reason: Jurassic Park.
1993 was the year Spielberg's classic hit the big screen, its blend of beautiful CGI and practical effects instantly cementing its place in the cinema Hall of Fame and continuing Spielberg's style as a benchmark for blockbuster cinema. It was the Spielberg audience the studio hoped to capture, but this has never been Robocop's style. Going from an 18 rating to a 12A to try and capture the younger market only ended up making it feel weird and out-of-place in the series, and it's a smorgasbord of bloodless carnage, battles where no one seems to be able to shoot straight, and everything feels soft and safe despite Officer Lewis's death. Incidentally, there's a whole running theme where every woman seems to have the hots for Robocop, for no reason, and Paul Weller couldn't reprise his role so we ended up with Robert John Burke - who was in all fairness a really good facial match. The problem with it is he doesn't quite capture the physicality, and it's not helped that instead of his leg-pistol he uses a machine gun attachment replacing his left hand. Watching Robocop 2 and 3 in a row, it feels even weirder to watch this weird gun-arm Robocop and see that nothing looks quite right. Literally everything about this movie is wrong, and I could not focus on it.
The best bits: CCH Pounder as Bertha, the resistance leader and one of the best characters in the movie. Oh, and there's a bit where two punks set Robocop on fire and he just keeps walking towards them. That's it, those are the best bits. Literally everything else is terrible. And the worst part about it is Nikko.
Let's talk about Jurassic Park again, because it bears some striking similarity to Robocop 3. You might remember the two precocious children in Jurassic Park, Tim and Lex. In the film, Lex is a hacker girl and probably gymnast who bravely hacks the computer system late in the film to save the day. Tim, her younger brother, is... mostly a damsel in distress, falling off things or getting electrocuted and generally needing to be saved. Early in the movie he gets to ask Dr Alan Grant about dinosaurs and that's the extent of his contributions.
Nikko is a lot like Lex. She's hyper-qualified, a genius hacker and like eight years old. She can make an ED-209 friendly, she helps out the rebels before she even knows they're rebels, she's generally on the side of the good guys because she's supposed to be a good guy. She has zero motivation - even her separation from her parents feels forced.
A little bit about the story, because it's really confusing. The dream of OCP to create a shining city out of Detroit is dashed by bankruptcy, and they're bought out by the Kanemitsu Corporation, who... decide to do the same thing. They set up the Rehabilitators - "Rehabs" - to bring law and order and help the police, but their true mission is the eviction of Cadillac Heights to pave the way for Kanemitsu's modernisation of Detroit.
This is where we first meet Bertha, who gets a badass moment and rallies the people, but ultimately must retreat as the rehabs force people onto the buses. In the maelstrom Nikko gets separated from her mother, literally just dragged away by some faceless goon and left in the middle of the street for no reason - she's not shoved onto a bus, she's not kidnapped, she's just... left. Anyway, she meets up with the rebels whilst escaping a rehab soldier and helps them break into the police armory. By hacking an ED-209.
She is like eight.
I want to make this very clear. She's an eight-year-old girl. Who is somehow a genius hacker. Who helps the good guys for no reason. She has no reason to help them. She's the most annoying character in the movie.
This is the problem. Nikko is a Mary Sue. There is no basis for her being able to survive and be there, nor is there any basis for her to be able to hack all these things - she just can, because she has a computer and that means she's an awesome hacker. She knows things she shouldn't know - the location of the tracker in Robocop's armour, for example - and she does things she shouldn't be able to do. She feels fake, and that isn't helped by everything in the world feeling fake thanks to the sheer bloodlessness.
There's other things, like the completely random (possibly - this movie is hard to pay attention to) Japanese cyborg ninja terminators, the return of Dr Lazarus who has apparently fallen in love with Robocop (her return is fine, it works - the falling in love with Robocop doesn't), the death of Lewis, presumably because instead of wearing her regulation police gear including bulletproof vest, she's wearing overalls the whole time - I honestly have no idea why this is the case, I presume budget issues because I really can't fathom why they'd do it otherwise, except that they decided they wanted to kill her off.
But all of these, for me, pale in comparison to Nikko, who utterly ruins the atmosphere from the beginning. The camera screams "CHOSEN ONE!" and she sounds overly smart and utterly inhuman. She's such a central focus, and there's not nearly enough justification or payoff.
And I have just learned that Nancy Allen demanded her character die in the first half of the movie, which tells you all you need to know about Robocop 3.
Why does this bother me so? Because these movies could have been great. Get rid of that one scene in Robocop 2, you can get rid of all that directive crap with it because that was only there for that one scene (and incidentally, when Murphy electrocutes himself to reset his directives, he ends up with zero directives - which is no longer the case as of Robocop 3 and ruins the continuity and brought me out of the movie again), and you could fill it with much more interesting stuff. More about Mayor Whittaker deciding to deal with Hob to try and bail out his city, maybe flesh out his character! Give us some stakes in the final battle, make the other characters more detailed instead of sidetracking the story with a bunch of kids! Get rid of Nikko in Robocop 3, you can add the blood back in, there's another tech-savvy character in the rebels already (who is literally only there to show how much smarter than everyone else Nikko is) and honestly stop trying to pander to an audience that doesn't care for Robocop! Kids can't watch the original, they can't watch the second one! They're not going to see what you're doing, that's why it's able to be so bloody and adult! Because it's aiming at adults!
Robocop 3 is such a mess, it's the only one I can't fix by just removing the kid. But it's still easy enough to fix - have the city of Detroit finally rise up against OCP. Have them say no more, they want to take their city back! Whittaker leads them, maybe - that gives us someone from the second film we can identify with! Only in the confusion Whittaker is kidnapped. Riots happen as the Rehabs clash with protesters and police, and Murphy and Lewis must try to restore order. Meanwhile Whittaker is being transformed into a new, even better model, and after the fiasco with Cain in Robocop 2 they're not taking any chances this time...
Oh, look at that. I've written a better movie already. Since the first Robocop the franchise has suffered from disastrous misfires in terms of story, aiming at all the wrong places. And kids certainly didn't help with that. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to watch the reboot.
If only to convince myself that 3 was not the worst it got.
Adieu!
No comments:
Post a Comment