Detroit’s Protector Returns

There are some franchises that last the test of time. Even when certain parts of the series fail to meet expectations, the franchise still has enough good will built up that it can weather the storm Some manage to rise again, such as the Predator series, revived by the success of Prey. Others fail to understand the magic of what made the earlier entries special and can’t understand why people don’t want to keep coming back for further adventures, like in the case of the TerminatorIs it a series about a future nuclear war and the survivors of the aftermath? Is it a series of chase movies set in the present day? Is it a series about time travel? That fact is that the Terminator series is all of those concepts. The mash-up of genres and ideas shouldn't work, but the films have proven adept at mixing into a heady series unlike any other. series. Sometimes it’s hard for a series to let go.

Very occasionally you’ll get a long running franchise that is only successful based on the strength of a single entry. That’s where RoboCopDetroit's finest protector, this cyborg first debuted in Paul Verhoeven's satirical, over-the-top violent, action film. lies, a series built on the power of its first film, that hasn’t managed to create anything that equals its strength since. The second and third films failed to reach the heights of the original, and three subsequent television series all played down towards kids despite how graphic and gory the original film was. And the less said about the hollow shell of the remake, the better. RoboCop stands as a franchise that really should have remained a single, bellowed film.

There is another bit of media for the franchise, though, that flew under the radar and might just be worth watching. Created in 2001 by Fireworks Entertainment and MGM Television, RoboCop: Prime Directives aired in Canada and then again the Space network, and then again in the U.S. on SyFy, and it was largely ignored due to poor marketing and its low-budget. But for those that tuned in they got something much closer in style and tone to the RoboCop they remembered. It wasn’t perfect, with a lot that could have been improved if the series had been given a larger budget to play with, but within its limited means this set of four movies, presented as a mini-series in total, proved there was still some life in the RoboCop concept.

We’ll go over each of the feature-length episodes in order., starting with the first, “Dark Justice”. In it, Detroit’s Protector (now played by Page Fletcher) has a run-in with a new, mass-murdering psychopath, Bone Machine (Richard Fitzpatrick), who curiously seems to have tech straight from RoboCop’s own source, OCP. Curious about it, RoboCop goes back over recordings of his incident with Bone Machine, eventually getting the proof that, somehow, the killer got his hands on OCP tech. He takes this proof to the newly hired head of Delta City security, RoboCop’s former partner (back when he was still just Officer Alex Murphy), John T. Cable (Maurice Dean Wint).

Cable immediately agrees that there’s something suspicious about the tech Bone Machine is using. He goes to his contact at OCP, his ex-wife and current head of Security Consulting in OCP, Sara Cable (Maria del Mar), but she effectively brushes him off. Eventually he gains access to an OCP vault with their failed projects, which is where the tech that made up the Bone Machine suit should have been, but he finds it gone. Worse, he learns he’s been framed for the crime, and that Robo has been reprogrammed to hunt him down and kill him. Can Murphy resist his new programming? Can Cable survive long enough to reveal the truth?

As presented in this first movie, “Dark Justice” is a very stripped down version of RoboCop. Most of the show feels like a standard cop drama, with dingy sets, basic production values, and very little in the way of sci-fi. If it didn’t have a robotic cop at the center of it all you’d probably be able to mistake it for any inner city cop show. There are little flourishes here or there that set it in a dystopian sci-fi world, but these are minor and fleeting while most of the show is dim and drab.

We can’t really fault the series too much for this. The production budget on this series was reportedly quite small, and when you have to furnish a full suit of robotic armor for the main character, plus another set of slightly different armor and weapons for the main villain, all on a made-for-TV budget, corners have to be cut. It’s honestly impressive they made Robo look as good as they did, likely working off existing molds of the armor plating to get just the right feel for the suit. It’s the one thing that looks distinctly right in this series.

I will also credit the fact that the show tries to get back some of the satirical edge that was sanded off in the later films and other television shows. We get a series of interstitial news reports and commercials much like what came in the first film. They report on the news today, poking fun at the world even as the newscasters try to report their OCP-issued propaganda with a straight face. This is the kind of content that helped set the first film apart from being just another generic action film, and it's nice to see the return here in the series.

With that said, some parts of the show look really cheap. Bone Machine’s suit is just awful. It doesn’t look like something that would exist in the world of RoboCop. Instead it would fit better in a low-budget Power Rangers rip-off, like a Z-Grade Beetleborgs spin-off. It’s too chunky, too silly, like Bone Machine walked in from a different story, overacting and under delivering, all to make up for how shitty his suit is. It’s embarrassing, really, and it makes you wish the suit itself had been cut from the production. Just give Bone Machine a kevlar vest and really cool weapons. The suit is too much.

RoboCop: Prime Directives also lacks blood, gore, and violence. I get it’s made for TV, yes, but there is a certain minimum standard you would expect, and “Dark Justice” doesn’t deliver. It’s moody and slow, failing to find the violent fun of the older films. Yes, you can say part of its pacing is because it’s trying to set up the story of the show and do all the heavy lifting getting the characters in place, and I understand that. But it needs more life, more action, to perk up what is, by most accounts, a pretty straight forward, even kind of dull, story.

I didn’t hate “Dark Justice”, but I also can see why this one flew under the radar. As the pilot episode for this mini-series, this feature-length story doesn’t excite the way it needs to. The acting isn’t bad, and the story has moments where I could see what the creators were trying for, but on the whole this first episode drags when it needs to shine, and it just can’t carry the weight a RoboCop series should. Hopefully RoboCop: Prime Directives gets better from here…