Robocop: Dark Justice (2001)

Alex asked me to check out at least the first five minutes of this. He thought it was a crappy movie, a 'turd covered in burnt hair,' to use his description. It's actually the first episode (90 minutes?) of a very short-lived TV show, Robocop: Prime Directives. Be that as it may, I watched it, so I have to at least salvage a blog post out of the experience.

Set 15 years after the first movie, Robocop's still active on the streets, but may be starting to break down. There's only one technician assigned to look after him, and she admits some of his parts aren't even made any longer.

More than that, Murphy is struggling to understand why he's there. As in, why were they able to successfully revive him when all other attempts failed? Could be something in that, a spiritual crisis as Murphy concludes there was no higher power or purpose behind his survival, just him as a weapon in a dick-measuring contest between execs.

The main conflict, however, was a big lunatic with high-powered weaponry calling himself Bone Machine, who is causing the major portion of crime in "Delta City", if the pie chart shown during a news clip can be believed.

(Supposedly the city is much more peaceful thanks to Robocop, but with the way it's shot, it looks like a deserted slum, and the episode opens on a bunch of guys calling themselves "The Bombs" who are threatening to kill themselves and a bunch of hostages.)

Robocop teams up with a hotshot cop with the last name Cable, who was Murphy's partner before he transferred to Metro West and got shot to pieces by Red Foreman like a dumbass. The episode keeps doing these flashbacks of Cable being used as a human shield by someone, before finally revealing the guy was some kind of cannibal, and that Cable shot him after he was disarmed because they entered the house without a warrant, so the guy would have walked.

Except they found a live woman duct-taped in the guy's basement freezer who presumably could have testified he kidnapped her, so yeah, whatever. But part of the plot revolves around someone adding another directive to Robo's system, and him not being able to either delete it (as he did in the second and third movies) or find a clever workaround like in the first movie. He just succumbs to the directive, so the story can have him be guilty about it.

There's a thread about Murphy's son being a new hotshot in OCP's executive class, and being offered the chance to join some secret cabal (which also includes Cable's ex-wife) within the company dedicated to doing whatever it takes to save OCP. Also, it hints he's going to learn what really happened to his dad at some point. Which, if any of these people could act, might be fun.

There's so many strange pauses before people start talking. The conversation between Murphy's kid and Cable is like that the whole way through. I can't tell if it was edited poorly, so there's an extra second or two of footage before the person was supposed to talk that shouldn't be there, or if these folks just thought everyone needs to wait two seconds before responding to the most innocuous questions, but it's really noticeable. No piece of media needs that many dramatic pauses.

The effects are as bad as you'd expect from early-2000s TV. Poorly edited in fire, gratuitous us of slo-mo, ugly blur around people who are supposed to be speaking in front of a screen. If the idea was Delta City was doing alright, but the secret cabal are prepared to burn it to the ground to improve OCP's stock price, the visuals we get don't back it up.