By Geno McGahee
What the fuck? I could end my review right there. ROBOCOP 3 is a movie that I owned for some time but never had the courage to put it into my DVD player and watch. This is the only entry in the original series that does not feature Peter Weller. In 1993, Weller wasn’t up to much. He had nothing going on but he still passed on ROBOCOP 3. I wonder if they offered him money and he countered with a higher amount and said “your move creep,” to the producer. That would rule if he did. I’d like to think Weller would. Whatever the case, they replaced Weller with Robert John Burke and he tries to live up to his three names, but it’s difficult to look at him in the same role. He tries to speak like Weller but he just can’t nail it. You can quote me on it. John Burke could never nail Weller.
In this flick, we have OCP trying to create their “Delta City” by chasing out all of those eye-sore homeless people away and building up Detroit the right way. I had a hard time accepting them as the bad guys in this film. There is nothing more annoying than one of those homeless jerks at a stop light or a highway off ramp, holding a sign and begging for money. I wouldn’t mind seeing OCP blowing them away or dragging them off. Opposing OCP is a group of homeless people, led by the annoying Bertha (CCH Pounder). She adopts the orphan, Nikko (Remy Ryan), and they are off to stop the madness and save their homes.
One of the first things that annoyed me with this film was Nikko. I am not a big fan of kids that prove to be the most courageous of the lot. When Nikko is confronted by the ED209, she quickly runs under its leg and reprograms it. Fucking stupid. The creators of ED209 would have locked up the electrical circuits. The kid opened up the leg easily with a twist and then the ED209 was under her control, but, amazingly, the homeless rebels leave it behind. You’d figure that it would be the best to keep it around to take down OCP. ED209 would tear them up!
We see Lewis (Nancy Allen) return, until they kill her off about ten minutes later. I think that she was shocked when she realized that Murphy wasn’t the same guy, giving the OCP time to (spoiler) shoot her dead. “You’re not Murphy. Who the fuck are you?” “I’m Robert John Burke, creep.”
Now, the makers of this film probably realized that they were not breaking any new ground and just taking a shit on the old ground, so they added something new. Robocop can now fly. Yes. He can fly, but before he can save the day, he has to fight off a robot ninja and when he kills one, OCP reveals that they have several robot ninjas that he must contend with. They don’t prove to be very effective. They seem to die rather easily. OCP should have stuck with the ED209 and just fixed that security breach thing that crippled it in the past.
Robocop becomes the king of the homeless and saves the day. The city is destroyed, but at least the homeless can move back into their abandoned buildings and contribute nothing while the tax-payers help rebuild the city. Fuck Robocop. OCP had its issues but it was trying to make the world a better place. It’s no wonder why Weller refused to do this one. He did not support the direction of this film and neither do I.
ROBOCOP 3 is so bad it’s good. It’s laughingly bad, but it’s entertaining. I enjoyed the crazy ninja robot and his absurd expressions and the bad guys in this were pretty fun across the board. They brought back a lot of familiar faces to link this to the others but you can’t compare. Remarkably, this movie had a 24 million dollar budget and it recouped 10 million of it. Hey, that’s not bad for a movie this terrible. I don’t look at it like a 14 million dollar loss at all. It’s a 10 million dollar win! That many people paid to see this! And they could have all demanded refunds, but they didn’t. That means they either enjoyed it or were so disgusted, they never wanted to think about it again and just cut their losses.
ROBOCOP 3…I recommend it! Yes, it’s not the same Robocop and yes, it’s fucking horrible, but I laughed a lot during it. That’s worth something.
Rating: 5/10 – You’re the wrong Robocop, Creep.
