Title: Robocop Trilogy
Starring: Peter Weller, Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Kurtwood Smith, Robert Burke
Directors: Paul Verhoeven, Irvin Kerschner, Fred Dekker
Duration: 102 mins / 82 mins / 104 mins
Released: 15 October 2010
Certificate: 18
Robocop (1987). In the near future (well in the past now), Robocop is set to fight a sadistic crime wave that has been troubling Old Detroit. A private corporation, Security Concepts Inc. Has taken over control of the police force and the executives think that the answer is not police men and women on the street but robotic enforcement. ED 209 is the answer
well until he murders one of the executive anyway. Then when Officer Murphy is brutally attacked and fatally injured (but kept artificially alive) a new answer is invented in the form of a cyborg Murphy in a robotic armour plated body. Robocop is born and hits the streets.
Robocop 2 (1990). RoboCop has to face an even bigger challenge. Peter Weller returns as the cyborg cop to rid the street of Old Detroit of a deadly new designer drug ‘Nuke.’ What’s worst is that Security Concepts Inc. Now want develop RoboCop mark II a newer, bigger and more powerful version to replace the original.
Robocop 3 (1993). Omni Consumer Products (OCP), the conglomerate that designed Robocop now owns Old Detroit and wants to tear down the old neighbourhoods. Robocop, sworn to protect the public, joins forces with a band of urban freedom fighters battling to save their neighbourhood.
Robocop as written by Ed Neumeier and directed by Paul Verhoeven is a classic film Robocop II, is also a decent film, written by Frank Miller (Sin City, The Spirit) and directed by Irvin Kershner the producer of the original film. Robocop III was pretty much a simple cash-in on the first two films (this time directed by Fred Dekker, but it is still fun in a camp/cheesy way and retains some humour and was again scripted by Frank Miller.
Love it or hate it and I think you’ll find very few detractors the Robocop series was new, fresh and anarchic. Robocop is the sort of no nonsense film that I miss. This was one of the classic films of the 80s. A decade that wasn’t afraid to have violence, sex and profanity in cinema, they were all part of the mix. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I long for the sort of 80s films of excess. The directors that were fearless, the likes of Brian De Palma (Carlito’s Way), Paul Verhoeven (Robocop, Starship Troopers, Total Recall), Sam Raimi (Darkman, The Evil Dead), John McTiernan (Predator, Die Hard) and even a pre-sanitised James Cameron (Aliens, The Terminator) they were the type of director not afraid of making a film for adults with adult themes and language and violence to match.
I long for the days of the 80s when films like Robocop, Darkman, Aliens, Total Recall, Predator and Terminator ramped up the adult content. Those films were all 18 rated with blood, guns, violence, swearing and sex. I love watching those films even now, they’ve hardly aged and they take you back to a day when writers and directors seemed to have some sort of devil-may-care attitude to cinema. Forgotten were the more timid films of the earlier years of cinema in the 50s and 60s. It was a golden age of cinema before, in the late 90s, everything became much more sanitised again and all the weaker for it. The cinema of the 80s belonged to adults now the cinema belongs to kids again watching popcorn, tween-friendly, sappy junk.
Robocop is maxed out on swearing and violence just look at the brutal scene where pre-Robocop Murphy is cruelly and cold-heartedly fatally attacked by Clarence Boddicker’s gang of mercenary, merciless thugs. It’ll have you cringing and squirming in your seat, regardless of how many times you might have seen it before. But then at other times Robocop has its tongue in its cheek with some clever humour even including sleazy mock adverts with the catchphrase: I’d buy that for a dollar and pitch-perfect pitch-black humour.
Each of the films in this trilogy release has been worked on to bring them up to the HD standard and they look good. The colours are bright and the image is crisp. There is very little grain and this is certainly the best Robocop has ever looked.
And even if Weller doesn’t really turn up for Robocop II all but phoning in his performance and indeed doesn’t even appear in the final instalment of this trilogy, we will always have the original film to fall back on a true classic and a true product of the times. We’ll never see the like again.
