Robocop III Provides the Commie, Jet-Pack-Fueled Insanity We Both Crave and Need — It Turns Out the Naming Rights! Membership Option Was For Real and Someone Is Now Five Hundred Bucks Poorer Presents Nat

Some franchises are blessed to have budgets that expand exponentially alongside box-office grosses. Not Robocop. By Robocop 3, which was filmed in 1991 but went unreleased until 1993 due to Orion’s bankruptcy, the franchise was in serious cost-cutting mode.

The series was learning to do without. By the second sequel Peter Weller, who breathed life and pathos into the role of Alex Murphy/Robocop but made no secret of his disdain for the hours upon hours of daily make-up that went with the job, was gone, replaced by the less expensive and accomplished Robert John Burke.

Burke is known primarily for taking over the role of Robocop and his collaborations with Hal Hartley in Simple Men, Flirt and No Such Thing, where he confusingly also played the character of Robocop. He did such a great job playing a half-man/half-machine law enforcement machine in the indie auteur’s low-budget cult films, absolutely killing lines like, “Freeze, dirtbag! And get ready to have an arch, quirky, overly stylized conversation about art and loneliness” that the Robocop people figured that he should play Robocop in a Robocop sequel as well.

Robocop 3 did not have Peter Weller. It didn’t have a big budget, or, to be brutally honest, an adequate budget either.

The costumes in Robocop 3 are so cheap and shoddy-looking that it looks like they saved money by buying off-brand Halloween costumes with names like “Compu-Crime-Fighter” off the rack from a Party City on November 1st. The choice to make the good guys hobos similarly feels like a pragmatic choice: you save a lot of money dressing your cast in rags.

To save costs Robocop 3 filmed in Atlanta in buildings slated to be destroyed to create facilities for the 1996 Olympics. After flirting with an X rating with the hyper-violent first film and landing solidly on a hard R for the sequel Robocop 3 pivoted sharply and perversely to appeal to kids with a family-friendly PG-13 rating.

Robocop 3 didn’t have Peter Weller. Or Paul Verhoeven, director of the iconic first film. Nor did it have the unexpectedly high-powered behind the scenes team behind Robocop 2: Empire Strikes Back director Irving Kershner directing a script from comic book god Frank Miller and Walon Green, whose credits include The Wild Bunch and Sorceror.

Robocop 3 didn’t have a big budget or a rating that would allow it to indulge in the gleeful ultra-violence that had defined the series as much, if not more, than its satirical ambitions and unexpectedly powerful metaphysical melodrama, its exploration of what it means to be a man, to live, to die, to hurt and to suffer.

The second sequel to Robocop had an ace up its sleeve, however. It had something the other two Robocop films desperately lacked, something that would single-handedly elevate it to unexpectedly great heights, literally and figuratively.

Robocop 3 had something wonderfully, exquisitely American, as American as mom, apple pie and school shootings: it had a motherfucking jet-pack.

A jet-pack!

In the great timeline of important historical events involving the Robocop franchise, the day some genius thought, “Fuck it: Robocop’s got a jet-pack now!” ranks right up there with the ecstatic moment the Robocop statue was unveiled in Detroit, finally giving the residents of that poor city a reason to feel civic pride and/or hope for the future.

Who needs that Peter Weller creep when you’ve got a jet-pack? Who needs profanity or excessive violence or an R rating? Who needs a halfway decent budget when you’ve got a jet-pack?

Even without the climactic reveal of Robocop’s jet-pack, Robocop 3 would still qualify as a staggeringly bizarre motion picture, a weirdly populist cartoon satire that centers on the adorable fantasy that Robocop, a police officer, robot-man and famous white heterosexual male, would be down for the revolutionary struggle rather than a shiny cog in The Man’s Oppression Machine.

We’d all like to imagine that Robocop would be on the side of the people and not the capitalist oppressors, that he’d be an android Che Guevara fighting the One Percent on behalf of the Ninety Nine Percent but that’s just not realistic.

Let’s be honest: Robocop would be sharing racist memes and voting for Eric Trump III, not swaggering around as a metal Marxist single-handedly striking a bold blow against the corporatization of American life with the help of The People’s Jet-Pack.

In Robocop 3, astonishingly, even the police are on the side of the oppressed masses. Forget the whole robot-cop thing: that is the film’s truly fantastical, science-fiction element. The cops in Robocop 3 all climactically quit in protest rather than be used by an evil corporation to evict poor revolutionaries locked in a righteous class war against an evil privatized police force.

Robocop’s improbable radicalization begins when he makes a judgment call in the line of duty, much to the horror and disgust of corporate scum Jeffrey Fleck (Bradley Whitford in one of his first big weasel roles) who casually insists that Dr. Marie Lazarus (Jill Hennessy) eliminate everything human about the crime-fighting cyborg, reducing him to a cold, inhuman machine.

The heroic Dr. Lazarus disobeys the command. Instead of becoming all machine, Robocop grows increasingly human after he falls in with a renegade band of impoverished rebels lousy with heavyweight character actors like CCH Pounder, Daniel Van Bargen and Stephen Root, who are being evicted from their homes by the sinister forces of Urban Rehabilitators known as “Rehabs”, a sinister private police force run by glowering sociopath Paul McDaggett (John Castle) out to evict the impoverished residents so they can build a glistening new consumer paradise.

Robocop 3’s emphasis on the violent class struggle between the evil, capitalist forces of oppression and rebels at the very bottom of the socioeconomic ladder lends it a distinct timeliness, as does a heart-wrenching scene where a computer hacker super-genius played by Remy Ryan is violently separated from her parents, who are subsequently killed. It’s always going to tug mercilessly at the heartstrings to see a child torn out of the arms of their parents by the forces of corrupt, heartless, greedy authority but it’s particularly devastating now that images like that can be found on the news as well in dystopian science fiction movies about evil corporations grasping for as much power as humanly possible.

In yet another exquisitely off-brand moment for this most bonkers of Robocop sequels, Robocop, whose directive to protect the innocent leads him to, like, realize that he needs to protect the BABIES from the freaking PIGS, man, and not the other way around, consoles a child on the death of her parents, even stroking her hair paternally, the way a police android built by an evil corporation obviously would.

In an even more wonderfully off-brand bit of comical business, Robocop requisitions the flashy ride of a procurer of female flesh so he spends at least part of this motion picture driving what is known in the cultural parlance as a “pimp-mobile.” Yes, Robocop drives a Pimpmobile as well as Jet-Pack; in deleted scenes I’m sure he robo-surfs and rides a Robo-Blimp.

The true villain of the Robocop franchise is capitalism. In Robocop 3, the evil fucks of Omni Consumer Products are supplanted by an evil more evil, even more rapacious, even more soulless and decidedly more Japanese hyper-capitalist cabal: the Kanemitsu Corporation.

Co-writer/director Fred Dekker, whose impressive resume included two cult hits, Night of the Creeps and The Monster Squad and some standout episodes of Tales from the Crypt was enamored of Hong Kong cinema and wanted to give the film a John Woo feel.

Dekker’s admirable ambitions unfortunately and unsurprisingly lead to less than noble results. Robocop 3 is very much a product of its time in portraying the Japanese as a malevolent economic force out to crush the United States with its cunning and cold-blooded calculation, an evil much more evil than even the evil fucks over at OCP.

Oh, and you know what else the Kanemitsu Corporation has? Fucking ninja Terminators. That’s right: in addition to Robocop in the Weather Underground AND a nifty jet-pack Robocop 3 has ninja Terminators in the form of the Otomo, a cyborg with the skills and preternatural reflexes of a cyber-samurai designed to destroy Robocop and act as enforcers for the Urban Rehabilitators/OCP and kill Robocop should the opportunity present itself.

Robocop 3 did not have the budget for ninja Terminators. It did not have the creative resources for ninja Terminators in the form of a high-priced stunt team and wire-work pros. But they said fuck it and went ahead and did ninja Terminators anyway. That’s the spirit that makes America great: ninja Terminators and Robocop in a jet-pack. To ask for more out of any one film, indeed, out of any one franchise, would be unbecomingly greedy.

Given its radically scaled down budget and new, cheaper star it’s nor surprising that Robocop 3 sometimes feels like a pilot for a Robocop TV show. What is surprising is that it sometimes resembles the pilot for a Robocop sitcom full of dark comedy and robotically delivered one-liners.

There’s an exquisite moment of pitch-black dark comedy, for example, when the plummeting fortunes of OCP, has its horrified employees leaping out of windows to their violent deaths at a clip unseen since the stock market crash of 1929.

Jeffrey sneeringly tells a co-worker of the plague of suicides, “I’d eat a bullet. Less showy.” It’s a brutally funny line delivered with just the right note of calculating evil by a precociously smarmy Whitford that pays off bleakly and beautifully when he’s fired and we hear, but do not see, the self-directed gunshot that presumably ends the corporate bastard’s miserable life.

Later, a mustachioed Rip Torn, whose performance is pitched at the broad comic level of Down Periscope or a FOX sitcom of the era, asks a crazed McDaggett if he’s gone “War Wacky”, a hilariously tasteless euphemism for PTSD/Shell-shock/Combat Shock Torn delivers with demented brio.

I was not prepared for Robocop 3. I expected a movie that was a little campy and a little tacky and vulgar in that full-bodied, unapologetic Robocop fashion but not something this next-level bonkers. I wasn’t expecting jet-packs. I wasn’t expecting ninja Terminators. I wasn’t expecting Stephen Root to have as much screen time and more of a dramatic arc than the dude playing Robocop. And I sure wasn’t expecting Robocop to be on the side of the People against the Man in all-out class warfare that pits a politicized, radicalized police force against the Urban Rehabilitators and goons known as Splatterpunks.

Splatterpunks, as you might imagine from their names, all look like extras from Death Wish 3, grimy New Wavers circa 1983 or so who appear prominently in an early scene spouting dialogue so slang-heavy as to be pure gibberish, wannabe Clockwork Orange splickety garble like “Pop a tranq, hypno head! Splatterville is ours!” and “Clock it, Jack! Megazone Invasion!”

It’s easy to see why Robocop 3 was a huge flop that killed an iconic and beloved franchise in its relative infancy and seemingly ended Dekker’s career as a feature filmmaker. He hasn’t directed a movie in the 26 years since the moviegoing public said hell no to Jet-Pack, Bernie Sanders, Emo, Ninja Terminator-battling PG-13 Robocop Not Played by Peter Weller as inauthentic or not legitimate for some reason.

That’s a shame, because Dekker is a hell of an interesting director with an impressive resume of two cult hits, some great television and a Robocop sequel that is infinitely crazier and more fascinatingly WTF than its reputation suggests.

Robocop 3 tried to tame a deliberate and masterful exercise in stylized ultra-violence for the sake of kiddies who loved the Robocop cartoon and video games. That’s one of a series of amazingly misguided choices that make this an unexpected treasure of unintentional camp comedy.

As a light science fiction comedy for families, Robocop 3 is sometimes deliberately funny but its biggest laughs are most assuredly happy accidents.

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