Robocop 3
Starring Robert Burke and Nancy Allen
Reviewed by Arun Pradhan
It's Fred Nile's dream come true: clean, safe, crime-free "Delta city". The advert for Delta city rings joyfully across the cinema with images of Mummy and Daddy, their two well-behaved children and even the family dog. We are told that construction has begun and that it can all be yours thanks to Omni Consumer Products.
Unfortunately, on the proposed site of this utopia are the homes and lives of thousands of people. So the plot thickens as OCP brings in a crack army (recently returned from fighting in South America) to clear out the "vagrants".
Certainly not a remarkable plot. It relies on the familiar action formulas: the bad guys kill and maim continuously so we don't feel so bad when they die horribly at the end. Before the hero can shoot or kill anyone, he has to make a glib one-liner and so on.
What is remarkable is the world in which Robocop is set. It springs from the mind of Frank Miller, whose long history ranges from a multitude of graphic novels (the respectable term for "comics") to working on the Batman movies. Anyone familiar with his work will know of his skill at taking the worst aspects of US culture and capitalism and showing us where they lead.
So we have "Newsbreak" on TV: "you give us three minutes and we'll give you the world" (This certainly isn't too far away). We have a police force that, like everything else, has been privatised and is owned by OCP. Within OCP, everyone is expendable, and we watch as business people jump from their skyscrapers or shoot themselves because they can no longer take it. Things aren't much better outside, where we have unemployment, high crime rates, a growing underclass: all too realistic.
Just to make sure we get the point, Miller has managed to sneak in characters talking about the "blurred line between big business and war" and even graffiti that better describes OCP as "Oppressive Capitalist Pigs". Yet this doesn't get in the way of what Robocop 3 is, a big box office action film. So although the people organise and resist what is happening to them, they still need their knight in shining armour.
The plot doesn't hold together in parts, particularly when an 11-year-old child with a laptop can keep pulling off amazing feats that save the day. But don't be put off; indeed people who enjoyed the first Robocop will be pleased by the return to much of the humour that characterised it. For others, just don't expect much more than a clever (and disturbing) setting for a run of the mill action film.