Fred Dekker's 1993 film reduces the franchise's satirical intelligence to a minimum and its violence to a level suitable for the PG-13 rating that the production pursued in an attempt to broaden the audience. It is not without its moments of competence, but it is a picture that has abandoned the qualities that made the original a work of satirical art, and the result feels less like a continuation of the series than a diluted imitation of it.
At a Glance
Director: Fred Dekker
Runtime: 104 minutes
Starring: Robert John Burke, Nancy Allen, Rip Torn, John Castle, Jill Hennessy
Release: 1993
Critics Rating: ★ (1/5 stars, a toothless conclusion that abandons everything that made the original great)
Audience Rating: ★½ (1.5/5 stars, a disappointing finale)
Plot
OCP, now owned by the Japanese corporation Kanemitsu, is forcibly evicting Detroit residents from their homes to clear land for the Delta City development project. RoboCop joins a civilian resistance movement against the evictions, while OCP deploys a team of ninja androids called Otomo to suppress the uprising. The screenplay by Frank Miller and Fred Dekker introduces a child hacker as a significant supporting character, giving the picture a family-friendly dimension entirely at odds with the franchise's established register, and handles its political premise with a simplicity and a sentimentality that the original's more savage treatment of comparable material would not have permitted. The resistance movement premise is the franchise's most overtly political and potentially its most pointed, but the PG-13 rating and the screenplay's simplified approach prevent it from generating either the satirical force or the dramatic weight the premise requires. The decision to set the picture's central conflict as a community versus corporation struggle is a credible extension of the franchise's established themes, but the execution reduces it to a series of action sequences of such limited impact that the stakes feel entirely notional.
Characters
Robert John Burke replaces Weller as RoboCop, a casting change that costs the franchise its defining screen presence, and his performance, while competent, lacks the physical specificity and emotional depth that Weller brought to the role and that made the original's central performance so essential to the franchise's success. Nancy Allen's Lewis is given the franchise's most abrupt fate, and her departure is handled with a speed and a sentimentality the character's established importance does not deserve. Rip Torn's OCP CEO is the most enjoyably committed human performance, a corporate executive of comic pomposity whose scenes give the picture its most direct connection to the original's satirical register. The child hacker character, played by Remy Ryan, is the most dramatically misguided addition, a figure whose presence signals the production's abandonment of the franchise's established tonal identity more clearly than any other creative decision.
Meaning / Themes
The central concern, the corporate displacement of urban communities, is the franchise's most politically explicit premise and a credible extension of the original's privatisation critique. But the handling is so simplified and so sentimentalised that it generates neither the satirical force of the original's corporate critique nor the weight the subject matter requires. The introduction of Japanese corporate ownership as the primary satirical target reflects the period's anxieties about Japanese economic expansion without developing the observation with any consistency or depth.
Direction
Dekker pitches the picture at a register of family-friendly action adventure, removing the savage satirical excess that gave the original its most distinctive quality. The PG-13 rating requires the picture to present violence with a restraint the franchise's customary register cannot accommodate, and the action carries no genuine weight. The most telling tonal failure is the treatment of the resistance movement's struggle, which is presented with a warmth and a sentimentality that the franchise's established cynicism about human institutions would not have allowed.
Dekker's direction is the franchise's most workmanlike, maintaining a basic visual coherence without achieving the tonal distinctiveness or satirical precision of Verhoeven's original or even the competent darkness of Kershner's sequel. His handling of the action sequences is limited by the PG-13 rating's constraints, and the ninja android sequences, which might have provided the most visually inventive passages, are staged with a generic competence that the material's potential does not justify. Basil Poledouris returns to score the picture, and his work is the most reliable thread connecting the film to the original's quality, maintaining the franchise's musical identity with a care that the other creative decisions do not always match.
RoboCop 3 received poor reviews on its release and was a commercial failure, grossing approximately $10 million in North America against a production budget of $22 million. Critics condemned the PG-13 rating, Burke's replacement of Weller, and the abandonment of the franchise's satirical intelligence, and it is now regarded as one of the more instructive examples of a franchise's creative collapse, a picture that removed every quality that distinguished its predecessor in pursuit of a broader audience and achieved neither commercial success nor critical respect.
Final Verdict: The trilogy's most toothless and most inert conclusion, a picture that abandons the satirical intelligence, the tonal precision, and the physical authority that made the original a work of art. Burke's replacement of Weller removes the franchise's most valuable asset, the PG-13 rating removes its most defining tonal quality, and the screenplay's simplified treatment of its political premise removes the critical acuity that gave the original its enduring significance. It is the franchise at its most diminished.