RoboCop 3 (1993)

RoboCop 3 arrives as the third installment of a franchise already sagging under its own chrome, and it carries the additional burden of replacing Peter Weller with Robert John Burke, a substitution the film never justifies. The plot concerns Omni Consumer Products, now partly owned by the Kanemitsu Corporation, which intends to bulldoze the Cadillac Heights neighborhood to build Delta City. When the residents refuse to leave, OCP dispatches a private mercenary force called the Urban Rehabilitators to remove them. This is corporate villainy of the most legible kind. A boardroom decides a neighborhood is in the way, and hired guns handle the rest. The film's sympathies are unambiguous and its targets are easy. A pirate broadcast that tanks the company's stock price serves as the climactic weapon. The rich are eaten, and the credits roll.

The resistance that forms in response is notably diverse for 1993, led by CCH Pounder's Bertha, with Mako and Robert DoQui among its ranks and a young computer-skilled girl named Nikko as its most resourceful member. These characters are simply present. The film never pauses to congratulate itself on their existence, which is either admirable restraint or evidence that nobody gave it much thought. Women hold positions of competence here, from Nikko to Dr. Marie Lazarus to Officer Lewis, though the story remains a male-driven action vehicle and none of it amounts to a statement. The villainy is corporate, not racial. The film's interest in displacement is economic.

The film offers spectacle in place of moral instruction. Ninja androids, a jetpack, a firefight in a parking structure. The critique of corporate greed is genuine, but it arrives through explosions and a broadcast, subordinate to the machinery of an action picture. The softened violence, the gentler tone, the general air of a franchise being groomed for a younger audience, all suggest a production uncertain of its own purpose. Roger Ebert's one and a half stars remain the correct verdict. RoboCop 3 wants to say something about power and settles for saying it loudly. The sommelier notes a thin vintage, over-oaked, finishing with jetpack.