RoboCop 2 (1990)

RoboCop 2 arrives as the second installment of a franchise that already understood, in 1987, that the future would be owned by a conglomerate and leased back to us at a markup. Irvin Kershner's film, working from a Frank Miller screenplay rewritten by Walon Green, doubles down on that premise. OCP starves the police department to manufacture a crime wave, forecloses on a bankrupt Detroit, and breaks ground on Delta City, all while a drug called Nuke hollows out the citizenry. The cynicism is structural, not decorative. Corporate greed is not the villain here so much as the weather. That earns the film a substantial score on the eat-the-rich axis, and it earns it honestly, through satire, media pastiche, and the sight of a boardroom treating municipal collapse as a line item.

Elsewhere, the ledger is thinner. Nancy Allen's Lewis remains a capable partner, and Belinda Bauer's Dr. Faxx schemes with real conviction, but the film frames neither through any ideological lens; they are simply people who happen to be women in a macho action picture. The cast is mostly white, with a handful of Black supporting players who go unremarked upon, which is its own quiet form of correctness. Race never enters the frame. Neither does the climate, the body, or the mind. The film's only engagement with flesh is dismemberment, and its only engagement with the inner life is a cyborg recalling a Catholic childhood. History is not revised; it is simply relocated to a fictional Detroit and left to rot.

The sermonizing, such as it is, arrives through dark comedy and fake commercials, which keeps the preaching modest. We have seen worse. We have seen a great deal worse.