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THE MOVIE
Robocop (Peter Weller) is back in the sequel to one of the most acclaimed Sci-Fi films of all time, unfortunately this time not under the direction of Paul Verhoeven. Starting approximately a year after the events in the first Robocop film, the city of Detroit has an outsourced police department, which is run by the evil OCP (Omni Consumer Products) corporation. OCP, under the leadership of The Old Man (Dan O'Herlihy) has drastically cut the wages and conditions for the cities police force, prompting the police force to go on strike. The timing for this could not be worse; the highly addictive designer drug named Nuke created by Cain (Tom Noonan) is out on the market getting the entire city hooked.
Luckily the city still has Robocop to protect them and follow up on the nuke problems the city is encountering. Robocop manages to track down Cain and his cronies to an old abandoned warehouse. As a side note, bad guys love abandoned warehouses.. that is where cops should just go look all the time, forget the detective work and investigative stuff, just go searching the warehouses of the city, no doubt you will find them that way! The bad guys manage to get the drop on Robo and literally take him apart, delivering him in pieces back to the police where he is rebuilt. After being screwed with by OCP, Robocop manages to get back to his old self and successfully goes after Cain.
In the mean time OCP is working on their next Robocop, imaginatively calling him Robocop 2. With failure after failure of turning police officers into cyborgs they start turning to criminals for their experiments... and Cain is their prime candidate. From here you can work out what happens when we have two Robocops up against each other!
In this sequel they followed the standard sequel rules, more action, more explosions and bigger death toll. Unfortunately they forgot the rule about having a better storyline.
THE TRANSFER
Video:
Robocop 2 has been given a pretty impressive video transfer and is on a duel layered disc with the layer change occurring just over an hour into the film. We are given the film in its theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1 and we also have the pleasure of it being anamorphically enhanced.
Considering the age and quality of this film things are pretty good. We do have problems with film artefacts in the guise of black and white specks on the screen fairly regularly, plus some other nasties such as a bit of aliasing popping up here and there.
Colour wise this film is also presented fairly well. Robocops outfit looks nice, and we have some good rich reds in the form of blood and guts on the screen.
Overall a fairly good effort has been done in bringing this film to the DVD format.
Audio:
Unfortunately Robocop 2 does not have a 5.1 track; we are stuck with a plain old ordinary Dolby Digital 2.0 track. This means miss out on what could have been an excellent audio track with brilliant surround sound use for gun fights and loud subwoofer powered explosions. What we do get is a very basic track which gives us nothing special.
Everything sounds fairly nice, the audio is perfectly in sync and there is no problems understanding the dialogue. Considering this is only a 2.0 track it is fairly impressive what they have managed to achieve sound wise (some of the gun firing does sound damn good), but you cannot help wonder what it could have been.
THE EXTRAS
On this disc the only extra included is the full screen theatrical trailer.
SUMMARY
Robocop 2 is a passable sequel to the first Robocop film. Unfortunately it cannot live up the expectations that everyone had after the original film by Paul Verhoeven, but then again most sequels never live up to their expectations. For the action sci-fi fan Robocop and Robocop 2 really are must have DVD's for your collection.
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