RoboCop 2
Entry updated 10 February 2017. Tagged: Film.
Film (1990). Orion. Directed by Irvin Kershner. Written by Frank Miller, Walon Green from a story by Miller. Cast includes Nancy Allen, Belinda Bauer, Tom Noonan, Daniel O'Herlihy and Peter Weller. 116 minutes. Colour.
Dismissed by most critics as an unimaginative retread of RoboCop, RoboCop 2 nevertheless has merits. Its narrative clarity and dash, which deliver a vision of future Detroit as one of the deeper circles of Hell, a sort of Dante-meets-DC Comics, are a credit to the partnership of director Kershner (who made Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back [1980]) and screenwriter Miller (who wrote and illustrated the Batman Graphic Novel The Dark Knight Returns [books #1-#4 1986; graph 1986]). These qualities partially redeem RoboCop 2's simplistic repetition of the previous film's thematic concerns (anti-capitalism, anti-liberalism, casual slaughter and lots of cynicism about television news coverage) in a story where the good Cyborg cop (Weller) is again pitted against the evil corporation (privatizing the police force and about to do likewise to City Hall) and their new, drug-crazed cyborg killer. Rob Bottin's cyborg designs are appropriately grotesque. [PN]
links
previous versions of this entry