Robocop 3
Script/Story: 2
Acting/Casting: 2
Action: 2
Humor: NA
Horror: NA
Eye Candy: 3
Fun Factor: 2
Replayability: 3
Overall: 0.5

I didn't want to give this film even a .5 score, but since I didn't see the first hour of it (thank God!) I can't fairly give it no points at all. Maybe there's some gratuitous nudity or something early on, and that's enough to salvage something from this disaster? It seems unlikely, and that the non-action scenes would likely be even worse than the grand finale I sat through, but since I can't say for sure, I'm being merciful. It would hardly be fair to award my first ever 0 score to a movie I didn't watch in its entirety, after all.

Before flipping into it while channel surfing, I didn't even know they'd made a third Robocop movie. Having now seen it, if just the last half hour of it, I can honestly say, without exaggeration or hyperbole, that it was the worst movie I have ever laid eyes on. At the time I said, "This is the worst thing I have ever seen on television in my life." and while I meant it then, in retrospect that's probably not true, given how much awful stuff they put on TV these days. The fact that nothing worse immediately leaps to mind isn't exactly a good sign, though.

I thought maybe I was being harsh, and after all, I only saw maybe a third of it while flipping around to other channels during commercials, so I checked online. Bad idea. My girlfriend thought it was some direct to video thing, and it certainly looked about that quality (or lower, to be honest), but no, it was a real movie, in theaters and everything, back in 1993. There are reviews to prove it, including one by Ebert himself. Of the reviews on RT 17 out of 18 are negative, but the film really hits its stride on IMDB, where it's got a scintillating 3.1/10 score, good enough for #83 on the worst 100 films. I didn't even know IMDB had a bottom 100 list, but I do now. Thank you, Robocop!

Digging deeper into this debacle, I see that it was directed by Fred Dekker. Who? Exactly. He did that in 1993, and didn't work again until 2001, when he somehow finagled his way into directing several episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. Yes, the first Star Trek series since the original not to run for at least a full seven years. So was Robocop 3 so bad that its director couldn't find work again that century? Apparently.

I did not see the whole movie so I can't go into that much detail about why it sucked, but my god it was bad. Even leaving the plot aside (it was written by Frank Miller, who is supposed to be a comic god), and the painfully-awful special effects (Robocop has a jet pack thing, like R2D2 in Episode 2, and he's swooping around the city like a metal vulture, and he could not look more fake.) it was just a train wreck. I literally don't know where to begin. The acting was painful, the action was dumb, the costumes were thrift store, the motivations cliche and pointless; it just went on and on.

The big innovation were robot samurai, who looked like Korean guys in suits. One "fought" Robocop in this warehouse in the first scene we saw, and basically the samurai guy did a leaping double flip, and hit Robocop between the eyes with the butt of his sword mid flip. The camera cut to a long shot of the robot falling over bonelessly, like they put the costume on a manikin and kicked it over. It bounced and everything. The view then cuts back to the robot samurai who looks happy, (we had no idea it was supposed to be a robot yet) then starts doing this pointless twirling thing with his sword while he slowly walks towards Robocop, who is rolling around on his back like a turtle. That goes on for maybe 30 seconds, as the samurai keeps walking and never getting any closer, while doing his completely non-threatening sword spinning thing, and Robocop rolls around helplessly, apparently trying to reach his gun. Finally and inevitably, Robocop manages to grab his arm extension gun thing and plugs it into the socket in his forearm, just in time to shoot the robot before it cut him into scrap metal.  Even the death was embarrassing, since they clearly had no budget for special effects, and showed Robocop lying there and firing upwards, then cut to a long shot of an obvious manikin in the samurai suit, which stood there for a moment with one hand up before blowing up in a shower of sparks.  I can't imagine who edited that scene and didn't think it looked LOL fake, but anyway.

I suppose the long advance of the samurai while Robocop was trying to find his gun and flopping around was supposed to be dramatic and tense, but when two people are fighting and one is stupid and the other is inept, it's hard to root for either of them. Malaya and I watched it in shock, wondering who on earth wrote this dreck. And in the movie world, who programmed the robot samurai with the "screw around and show off instead of killing the enemy when they're down and near a gun" subroutine.  Not exactly the Terminator, was it?

Later we were treated to the spectacle of Robocop fighting two robot samurai at once, in the bad guy's skyscraper headquarters. Robocop flies in and breaks through the window, and shoots one of the samurai, but for some reason this one is bullet proof and its face sort of explodes, but it keeps fighting. Or not, since it never actually fought, but just circled Robocop while the other identical robot circled him as well. Robocop was of course totally perplexed by the non-kill, and instead of shooting some more, just in case, he just stood there and rocked back and forth, his springs squeaking, while the 2 samurai slowly circled him. Not swinging their swords or anything... just circling. And circling. There was even an overhead shot so we could see both samurai walking around. And around.

Finally the samurai leapt into action, and I mean "leapt." They both did a double flip thing over Robocop's head, and both hit him with the butt end of their hilts, and he fell down like a sack of cement again, and rolled around helplessly on his back. Again. While the samurai stood there and watched him instead of finishing him off. Again.

To the rescue came some cute little girl and her mom/babysitter, as they ran into the enemy HQ control room with their laptop, on which the girl randomly punched a bunch of buttons and somehow hacked into the robot samurais and reprogrammed them to attack each other. They did so, in amazingly-clumsy fashion, swinging their swords at the same time and hitting each other in a shot that was so obviously edited that it made my head hurt. They each blew up, of course, which made me wonder how they were bulletproof, but vulnerable to a weak sidearm swing from a sword.

Anyway, adding to the plot brilliance it turns out that there's a self destruct mechanism in each samurai, and that it's somehow tied to a briefcase with two red digital read out timers in it. The head bad guy screams that it's going to self destruct, but before he can do anything else Robocop rolls over into his flight backpack (a scene that was obviously reversed from an earlier scene when he rolled out of it) and with it locked into place he flies past the bad guy, scorching his legs with the jet exhaust, grabs the woman and child, and flies them to safety.  Left behind, with his scorched legs, was the bad guy, who then crawls across the room towards the briefcase, with the twin handy digital countdown devices. Shockingly, he doesn't make it, and we then see the entire skyscraper and apparently all of downtown Detroit incinerated in a more or less nuclear explosion.

What I didn't understand was if the bombs were in the samurai themselves, or in the briefcase. The counters were in the briefcase, but in either event, try to imagine that design meeting? So the robots are nuclear... but why in the hell do you design them to overheat and blow up when they get damaged? And if that design was unavoidable, why in the hell do you have a digital timer in a suitcase to tell you when they're going to blow up? Furthermore, the bad guy was clawing towards it as if he could have shut off the explosion from the briefcase. So every time one of the robots is destroyed it blows up a little bit, and then goes nuclear three minutes later... unless you push the "off" button in the briefcase? How about we maybe design them to automatically get the "off" signal unless it's overridden? That sound a little smarter?

The dumbest thing of all was that maybe the bombs were in the briefcase itself, and were somehow tied to the robots. Like the remote controls (which they never seemed to use) required thermonuclear detonators and enriched uranium or what? Or were there megaton bombs in the briefcase just for the hell of it. Better yet, two of them! So even if just one robot dies, the operator will die when the briefcase blows up. What happens to the second robot then, if escapes the blast while its controls are incinerated?  The mind boggles.

Amazingly enough, that wasn't the dumbest bit of action we saw.  No, there was a huge shoot out as well, where about fifty guys dressed like extras from The Road Warrior were marching down the middle of a street, heading towards a few dozen cops and good guy citizens, all of whom had cover behind overturned cars or were up on rooftops or something. The bad guys were walking along, all spread out and firing their rifles, while the good guys were shooting back, and yet no one was being hit. This despite the fact that the bad guys were taking no cover, wore nor armor, and were just walking along. The way they were spread out it would have been almost impossible to fire a bullet from street level and not hit one of them. Yet the cops managed just that at least 200 times.

Robocop's jet pack aside, the technology and weaponry seemed to have taken a big step back from Robocop 1 to Robocop 3, since just one of those explosive guns in the first movie would have won that battle in a matter of seconds; yet no one had anything more destructive than a shotgun. Hell, even the samurai robots just had swords, while one of those kill bot mech things from Robocop 1 would have turned them into shrapnel in an instant. Stop action model movement wasn't in the Robocop 3 budget, I don't guess.

The street battle escalated when a toy-looking tank drove up on the bad guys' side, and starting blowing up the buildings behind the cops. Fortunately, Robocop flew up just then and after buzzing the action once, he flew over again, and as he left the tank blew up, by magic for all we could see. Robocop then strafed the bad guys a few times while the cops and good citizens cheered, and then once he landed all of the bad guys were just sort of gone, so the citizens could celebrate and not have to clean up dozens of oozing corpses or anything gross like that.

The best scene of all though, was when the other head bad guy, played by Rip Torn, showed up at the end with some Japanese guys in a limousine. The Japanese guys were apparently funding the whole thing, but since they'd been defeated they wanted to bow to their bettors. Rip Torn's character (who was basically a corporate version of his producer on the late-great Gary Shandling Show) then starts kissing ass as well, and says to Robocop, "Say son, do you have a name? Can I call you Murphy?"  Robocop, who had once again suffered his usual "am I human or a machine" issues, replies, in his faintly-computerized voice, "You can call me Robocop." Words said to wild cheers from the various ragtag good guy extras.

I would like to repeat that I only saw the last 1/4 or so of the film, and yet there were three individual action scenes as dumb or dumber than anything I've seen in a movie since Episode One. In like 20 minutes!  God only knows what further horrors the first hour would have held, but I certainly don't want to find out.  I do want to see Robocop 2 someday though; I never have, and everyone says it's far more violent and nihilistic than Robocop was, and since that's about the bleakest and most unpleasantly-violent movie I've ever seen, those are some bold words.