Review of RoboCop 3 (1993) by Mickey M — 27 Jul 2008

The "Omni Consumer Products (OCP)" has tightened its grip on Detroit, to the point that the police department is now a division of the company. With the help of OCP's new Japanese owners funding everything, it appears that the dream of tearing down Detroit and replacing it with the advanced "Delta City" will finally happen. However, there are a citizens who have taken it upon themselves to fight using any means necessary -- including using violence and weaponry.

To tighten their grip on the citizens, "OCP" employs "Rehab Teams", which are basically military police headed by a maniacal leader named "McDagget" who employs even greater violence to try to bring the rebels to his brand of justice. However, after the death of his partner at the hands of the "Rehab Team" lead by "McDagget" himself, the rebels have a new partner in their fight -- "RoboCop" (Robert Burke).

This is not the greatest way to end the cult favorite movie trilogy. It is probably the most forgettable of the entire series in fact.

Although the story is pretty good, the script is not the best. And because of the weak script, the performances are only fair.

The one thing that seriously hurt this movie is that it is PG-13, while the others were rated R. Because of the rating, the action sequences are very much less violent than the other two, and the language is toned down quite a bit. I believe they were trying to market "RoboCop" to a more broader audience at this time. They released a cartoon series for television, and had "RoboCop" come to the aid of a professional wrestler known as Sting in a heavily hyped appearance on a World Championship Wrestling pay-per-view telecast (the PPV was even titled "Capitol Combat '90: The Return of RoboCop"). If you ask me, this was a serious mistake like when they turned "Rambo" into a cartoon.

Another problem with this film is that the budget is lower than the previous instalments. The first movie was known for the incredible special effects, make-up and obvious stop-motion effects. In first movie had major splatter when the "bullets" hit their target, that was obviously missing in this film.

None of the performances stood out, with a slight exception of Burke, who takes over the title role from Peter Weller. There was also some problems with the development of the new characters introduced in this movie.

Sad to say, I can only recommend this one if you happen upon it on HBO or On Demand. It's not the perfect movie, but it is pretty much watchable.