The three films making up the Robocop canon finally make their bow on blu-ray (with the Verhoeven's 1987 original arriving on the format a couple of years back, but who's keeping track), and it's interesting to revisit this franchise with ever-diminishing returns 20 years after the fact.
Robocop still stands as one of the great action films that still works as a brilliant piece of satire, thanks to the script by Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner which plays off the anxiety over the collapse of the inner city and the increasing reach of big business. Corporate entities have no obligation to anyone but shareholders, and humans can easily be turned into commodities, given the right circumstances. 23 years on and surprising how relevant the movie remains: Detroit is still a terrible place to live and over the last decade we've seen corporations become less shy about effecting social change, be it ousting public officials with which they disagree or creating media arms to move and manipulate the public.
Most of you probably know the story: dedicated Detroit cop and family man, Alex Murphy (Peter Weller) is gunned down by charismatic criminal Clarence Boddiker (Kurtwood Smith). Corporate giant, OCP--seeking the next big military-industrial hit--use the fine print in Murphy's contract with the police force to rebuild the top cop as a cyborg. He's the perfect, efficient, and obedient officer, but he starts to remember his former human life, and it's here that the man becomes better than the machine.
The first film was a box office success and also a benchmark for movie violence. So, accordingly, a sequel was released in 1990, under the stewardship of The Empire Strikes Back director Irvin Kershner, with a script by comic scribe Frank Miller that was deemed unfilmable and thus put in the hands of Waldo Green for rehabilitation. Grim, ugly, and mean, you can see the seams in this movie that attempts to work as the same kind of dark satire of the first film, but plays too heavily on the laughs.
The only particularly inspired element of the movie was casting Tom Noonan as the Elvis-obsessed, messianic drug pusher, Cain. This was the second and last time star Peter Weller would play Robocop, and we can understand why by the time the credits roll on this mess of a movie.
Robocop 3 was more or less the death knell of the character onscreen, with Nancy Allen only agreeing to appear in the film if she was killed off in the first half. She was smart to do so. More coherent than the second film, it's notorious among fans for being the PG-13 entry in the franchise, placing the title character alongside a group of ragtag rebels fighting against corporate giant OCP for control of their Detroit homes (here, played by the city of Atlanta). It's not terrible in the sloppy and disjointed way that 2 is, it's more of a problem of where (lack of) money meets ambition. The film often feels cramped and small in terms of execution, with some truly sad effects work--I'm looking at you, flying Robocop--on display.
Audio/Video
The visuals on the disc are nothing to get excited about, although this is probably the best the second and third films have ever looked in a home presentation. Still, there's nothing that's going to set the world on fire in terms of presentation, making the move to blu something short of a revelation.
The first film offers the most audio options, with 5.1 DTS HD and 4.0 Dolby available for the English tracks, and French and Spanish 5.1 Dolby mixes included. So that was nice, at least. Which leads to...
Special Features
Trailers and... nothing else. Which is kind of a huge bummer given that there's still that 20th Edition DVD floating around with an abundance of special features for the first film.