ROBOCOP: PRIME DIRECTIVES You poor Yanks will have to wait even longer for this than I did! Damn you, Toronto! You sons of bitches got to see these four movies (entitled Dark Justice, Meltdown, Resurrection and Crash & Burn) months before they were aired nationally on Space! And the rest of us had to wait a week - a fucking WEEK! - between installments! Fuck your city! Fuck it all, fuck it right into the lake, Pickering in particular! (don't ask) (deep breaths) Okay, I'm calm now. Sorry, I'm just not used to being sincerely jealous of any city other than Vancouver, and maybe Montreal because they get all the good live bands. It's kind of inaccurate to call this a series of four movies, since no one installment tells an encapsulated enough story to survive as being entirely comprehensible without the remaining episodes. It's a miniseries, pure and simple, but like recent episodes of ER, it's filmed in widescreen to give it a more "cinematic" vibe. (it was actually aired at least once in a Toronto theater, all four episodes back-to-back, months ago) After RoboCop, there was RoboCop 2, a movie that tried to go even further than the original in terms of violence and satire, and half-succeeding for the effort (yep, it was more violent). Alas, then there was RoboCop 3, which brought things down to the level of more unsophisticated teenagers, what with its afterschool-special moralizing, toned-down violence, and precocious genius kids. And at last, seemingly the final rivet in the coffin, came the RoboCop TV series which brought things down to the level of grade schoolers, apparently more concerned with selling action figures than giving poor RoboCop any dignity at all. Ferchrissakes, I just saw an episode of this the other day where RoboCop flung an energy weapon's beam back at his attacker by REVERSING THE POLARITY. Not only that, but the series selectively chose to "forget" the two movie sequels, which is just confusing. Even Yvette Nipar couldn't save that, and she's really cute. Things were not looking very bright for RoboCop's future. Fortunately, the screenwriters of RoboCop: Prime Directives (Brad Abraham and a vaguely familiar Joseph O'Brien) and director Julian Grant had the good sense, while crafting this project, to employ the elements which made RoboCop a success in the first place. Missing for a long time, it's nice to once again see RoboCop associated with a sly sense of satire, a lot of bone-crunching action (I wipe my sweaty brow with relief that it's action of the bone-crunching variety and not, generally speaking, of the wire-stunt The Matrix variety, which would be so inappropriate for RoboCop I don't think I could even describe the ludicrousness of it), and a mostly schmaltz-free look at a man struggling to reclaim the humanity that's been buried under machinery in the name of the public good. Depressingly mirroring the unhappy reality that the aforementioned crapwagons created, nobody seems much impressed with RoboCop (this time, played by Page Fletcher) anymore, despite how much he obviously has left to give to the world. Delta City is now complete, and virtually crime-free thanks to the efforts of RoboCop and his less armored human coworkers. The press doesn't see RoboCop as news anymore, and for that matter, he's rather the worse for wear; some of his parts are no longer even manufactured, and a close look at the RoboCop costume shows the scars of battles past. For that matter, many shots actually show him as being shorter than many of the humans that surround him. No, the press is more concerned about Bonemachine, a vigilante with a lot of hardware and a knack for escaping police barricades (despite how conspicuous he looks - he looks like he's got ED-209's arms!). Meanwhile, RoboCop's son - that is, from when RoboCop was merely Alex Murphy, cop - is rising in the ranks of OCP, the city-owning super-company which has its eye on creating a computer system that will monitor and control the entire city. Anthony Lemke plays James Murphy (not to be confused with the guitarist who's been in every death metal band ever to come out of Florida), who finds that he's working in a den of snakes and has to become one in order to stay viable. Some of these snakes are briefly sympathetic, but only because they're in scenes with others who are even more vile. Life as an OCP executive must be tough; this guy looks like he puts on about fifteen years between the first and last episode. So John Cable (Maurice Dean Wint), Alex's old partner from his old precinct (before he was shot to pieces in his new assignment of Old Detroit), is the only person that RoboCop trusts with the information that Bonemachine may well be an OCP agent. Then the suits (including Cable's ex-wife, played hissably by Maria del Mar) get a whiff of the new direction of RoboCop's investigation, some reprogramming is involved, and a certain cyborg's life gets a lore more complicated. Now, that's just how it sets up in episode one; things go off in a lot of directions after that. There are cybernetically enhanced bandits with Predator-like personal cloaking devices (which reminds me - Dark Horse comics have pitted the poor Predators against every hero and villain they can find, even when they're from another comics company entirely. Aliens, Judge Dredd, Batman, Superman...nobody was safe. Was there ever a RoboCop vs. Predator comic?), another RoboCop (with black armor!), probably the most devastating virus imaginable (however implausible, it's still a cool idea), a charismatic but apocalypse-minded mad scientist, a mad slasher, all sorts of OCP intra-corporate scheming, a gang of suicidal hostage-takers which keep blowing themselves up, the ominous "Systems Support", a delightful security system which slices people up like sushi, and so much more. Frankly, I'm amazed that all these balls were juggled without being dropped; these subplots don't just show up to add a wrinkle and disappear, things are actually done with them. (except for Bonemachine, he just kinda disappears at the end of the first episode) Page Fletcher makes an excellent Alex Murphy in the flashbacks, but unfortunately, he makes an inconsistent RoboCop. In flashbacks to his days as a beat cop, we're shown a side of Murphy which previous stories denied us; previously, all we knew about him was that he was a loving husband and father, and a bit of a cowboy on the job. Here, we see him as a well-meaning but somewhat naïve idealist who doesn't want to believe that a company like OCP might actually be a worse alternative to existing government. The cowboy we saw in the first film is put to a real test here in one scene, and he comes very close to blowing it with his (understandable) reluctance to risk too much. As for Fletcher as RoboCop, with the helmet on, he's fine - after all, like Batman, he's a mouth, a voice and a costume. Even his jaw is part of the outfit. When that helmet comes off, though, he looks like a freakishly overgrown baby poking out of a suit of armor. Fletcher is by no means a freakish-baby-looking person on his own (actually, he looks like Rutger Hauer) but the makeup and bald wig do him no favors, and one longs for the iron jaw of Weller or even Robert Burke, except for that one great moment when he pulls off his helmet and the jaw-piece remains in place. With a semi-psychotic look in his eye, he delivers this none-to-subtle Star Wars reference with great aplomb, even if, for the most part, his voice just doesn't resonate the way Weller's did. (However, the actor who plays the second RoboCop, and it wouldn't be fair for me to reveal who it is, has his voice appropriately "tweaked" so that he sounds wonderful in the role, and were it not for one obvious-when-you-see-it problem, he'd actually probably make for the best Alex Murphy/RoboCop yet in possible future projects) Now, much of the satire in R:PD, as was the case in the original RoboCop, is expressed in clips of TV ads and news shows, except here there's the mind-stabbing extra twist of having to not only listen to what's going on onscreen (in at least one part of the frame), but having to read two bands of written information is going past at the top and bottom of the screen. An enormous pain in the ass, to be sure, but that's what VCR's are for, and besides, at the rate attention spans are shrinking, this is probably what the news is gonna look like in ten years anyway. There is a LOT of funny stuff in here, all doubly funny for being extrapolated from existing nonsenses, like the Geraldo-like snoop into RoboCop's lair, complete with Pop-Up Video. Particularly gut-busting is an ad for a propagandistic cartoon where a robotic cop battles "homeless ninjas", and the increasingly astonishing rapidity with which TV movies and retrospective videos are cranked out to capitalize on what's current. Moments after RoboCop is declared something of a public menace, an advertisement runs for a program called "When RoboCop Attacks"! C'mon, that's funny shit! (although if giving the same name to a Teddy Ruxpin-like doll as was given to the killer samurai cyborg from RoboCop 3 is intentional, I fail to see the meaning behind it unless it's a parallel and unrelated tribute to Katsuhiro Otomo) Also a welcome return is the way OCP is portrayed as a corporation. The original film showed OCP as a rather morally disinterested corporation; certainly in pursuit of the almighty dollar above all else, but not overtly, gratuitously malevolent; only the individuals within the company were. The movie sequels made it malevolent, and the TV series pulled a 180 on that and made them the good guys all of a sudden! Nice to see the writers of R:PD remember that corporations, scummy as they might be, are never any better or worse than the people who run them, and don't do anything, good or bad, without a prize in sight. The script is fairly clever throughout, and never quite obnoxiously so the way that, say, Kevin Williamson is getting (getting?) (though a couple of oft-repeated lines wear out their welcome even spread out over six hours). The movie even gets some of its own slang, like "OCPeon", useless outside of the film of course but making perfect sense within. Making up sci-fi slang is a tricky business, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred it just sounds stupid; luckily, not here. Homage abounds, with tribute paid to Aliens, Philip K. Dick, Predator, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, John Woo flicks, Return Of The Jedi, The Dukes Of Hazzard (God help us) and even the city of Toronto itself, where R:PD was filmed (though I don't know what the significance of the latter half of that YYZ-493 license plate is). Also a neat idea is the most well-aimed gunshot in movie history. I know, it's just FX, but still, if you're too cynical to enjoy something as outrageous as that, then you probably shouldn't be watching a movie about a cyborg police officer. A lot of characters make their way across the screen here, way too damn many to really mention (I didn't even mention the kid, who happy happy joy joy is NOT I repeat NOT a computer hacker), ranging from the well-fleshed-out to the transient, but I think the right ones got the attention and got it in the right ways. Everyone up to the most obvious boo-hiss villains are given motivations that are hardly implausible. Hell, even that omniscient supercomputer gets a personality, giving some great parting words to one of the villains. R:PD is certainly not without its problems, some more niggling than others. I guess my biggest problem with this whole project is that it doesn't make clear soon enough just which of its predecessors were incorporated into its storyline. Normally, like with any sequel, you'd just assume it was all of them, but the TV series blew that one and until the facts are given it's anyone's guess. For example, it was quite some time before I was really clear on just how many people know the truth about RoboCop and Alex Murphy. In RoboCop 2, everybody was finding out. In RoboCop 3, everybody knew everything and had for quite some time. And the TV series went back to nobody knowing except RoboCop's partner and commanding officer. Here, several ambiguous-seeming scenes pass between Cable and RoboCop before it's clear that Cable suspects but doesn't know for sure that it's his old partner in that suit. When Cable tells RoboCop that he's replaying a chess game that he never got to finish with an old friend (read: Alex Murphy), is he unaware of RoboCop's true identity, or is he resentfully trying to tell the cyborg that he does not and will not think of him as his old partner? Hell if I can tell, until it's made clearer later on. Other things take even longer to be figured out. I'd figured that Old Detroit was dead and gone, bulldozed with Delta City built on top of it, as was the intention mentioned implicitly in the original film and explicitly in the sequels. Turns out it's still there, though we don't find that out 'til episode two. Maybe they built Delta City on top of Windsor. At any rate, it looks like R:PD ignores the events of both movie sequels (since here, a minimum of people know who RoboCop is) and the TV series (since there doesn't appear to have been some long-standing relationship between RoboCop and James Murphy, James ignorant all along of the cyborg's real identity). There are some other little plot problems, like how in one homage-loaded flashback to when Murphy and Cable apprehend a serial killer, Cable justifies shooting the villain by saying he would've walked anyway. Now, I understand that it's an old cop-movie tradition that apprehended serial killers will always get off on a technicality, but the cops in the movies themselves aren't supposed to know that. And throughout the episodes, men with machine guns continue to hunt down and attack RoboCop long after it's been made clear that regular bullets, even in great numbers, bounce off of him like raisins off an Oldsmobile. Nothing exactly new to the RoboCop projects, but that's kinda part of the problem. Other things are less problems than personal peeves. White-collar villains abound, but street-level thugs like Clarence Boddicker and the drug lord Cain are missed. Sure, there's Bonemachine (goofy mask) and that mad scientist, but they're closer to Lex Luthor-like semi-supervillains than gutterslime creeps. Similarly, watching two RoboCops duke it out is great, but I also kinda missed RoboCop smashing it up with a big, monster robot. Weird, mariachi-like "western" music figures with a lot of trumpet prominently in the score, for reasons I can't imagine. And for the first time, years are assigned to the events of the story (this one puts Murphy's original "death" in 1999) - I know, the fact that 1997 came and went without New York City being walled off doesn't make Escape From New York a worse movie, but "near future" stuff should, I think, keep us at least a little vague about the numbers. There are a number of scenes where people operate computers here, which as presented, is something of a blessing and a curse. On one hand, these look like relatively accurate depictions of computer operation, which as we've all noticed, is something pretty rare in the movies. (i.e. nobody here types out conversations with their computers in plain, full-sentence English) Unfortunately, much of this is shot in a way that makes what's on-screen very difficult to read, especially if you taped it on VHS. Still, in terms of story and character, R:PD is at least as good as the original film, and even in six hours (without commercials) doesn't have nearly as much wrong with it as the first sequel managed to pack into an otherwise enjoyable 110 minutes. The final episode is an exhausting hour and a half of non-stop action, which might have actually approached being unbearable if it didn't have so many possible outcomes. Most climaxes steer us towards one of two outcomes: pass/fail, good guy wins/bad guy wins. This one has a number of possibilities. Isn't that nice? Everybody has their favorite post-RoboCop followup; after seeing RoboCop: Prime Directives, everybody'll have a new one. Big claim, maybe, but it's a big show. See it when you get the chance; I hope it's sooner than later. BACK TO THE R's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE