RoboCop 2

March 6, 2010 IMDB Comment: Bad Daddy

*** This review may contain spoilers *** Sometimes it is more blatant, the pandering to the audience. But business is business. And like OCP in the movie, the makers of this are interested in only one thing: profits. So if you are supplying identity porn to adolescent boys, well then go full throttle.

Start with a moderately successful idea: cyborg cop dealing with issues of good and evil, human and machine, quest and family. The first movie made some money, but so far as you are concerned, it merely establishes characters and a situation for you to exploit. You hire a comic book writer whose career is based on kids. You hire the director who made the only palatable Star Wars film. And then you set about to engineer the story.

Boys like action-as-bullets, so you'll have that. There is the inevitability of punishment, so you'll build all the tension-producing scenes around the relentless powerful steps of the punisher. (Note how the sound engineer manages this as a sort of second score.)

But you'll put most of your effort into engineering a story about teen angst and fathers.

So here we have our cyborg yearning for his lost son, and his new families: a "mother" at the lab and "wife" in the force. We have a surrogate family of criminals, Father, mother and son, where the father becomes the opposed id, after the fashion of "Forbidden Planet."

You'll have subplots. For instance here the bad guy in the robot company is vying for parental approval.

Usually it is the noise and explosions that are in your face in these things. It keeps you from thinking. But here, the noise takes second place in overt attention-getting to these stories of lost teen boys.