R

RoboCop: Last Stand - Part One

by Frank Miller & Steven Grant

(Art by Korkut Oztekin)

Grant and Oztekin's adaptation of Frank Miller's unused script for the movie RoboCop 3.  With the OCP Corporation using their control of Detroit to drive the poor from their homes and crack down on any dissidents, RoboCop has gone rogue and is working off the grid to protect the people of the city.  However, without support he's fighting a losing battle which only gets harder when a mysterious assassin from Japan arrives in Detroit.

It's been a very long time since I watched RoboCop 3 but, from what I gather, Frank Miller's original script for it was garbage.  However, in most people's eyes the movie was garbage too, so I guess nobody wins.  What I will say is that there's enough of what I remember from the film here for it to be recognisable as connected, be it OCP trying to drive poor tenants from their homes, the reprogrammed ED-209 or the weird, never entirely explained, Japanese robot assassin.

There is nothing here that made me go "Oh my god!  Why didn't they put this in the movie!?" but there's also nothing here that seems to overly justify Miller's ideas being described as garbage.  If anything this book's big failing is that it continues to lean on the 'Corporations = Bad' button long after the original RoboCop nailed that concept perfectly.  (Don't get me wrong, corporations having as much influence in the world as they do today is definitely BAD, but anyone who's not already wise to that is either a corporate stooge or an idiot).

So really, this is fine.  I'm not going to go out of my way to seek out 'Part Two', but I would still happily read it if the chance arose.

3 out of 5