YMMV / RoboCop 3

• Audience-Alienating Era: Along with RoboCop: The Series, it's believed to be the start of the franchise's.
• Audience-Alienating Premise: As Cinematic Excrement points out, the movie doesn't seem to know who its audience is. Half of it is far too childish for the adults to enjoy, and the other half is way too dark for the kids. As such it appeals to no one and bombed in the box office.
• Awesome Music: Despite the many problems surrounding the game adaptation, the soundtrack is not one of them. The title theme, in particular, is a complete headbanger. While most would say that they prefer the NES version of the song, composer Jeroen Tel actually prefers the Commodore 64 version of the song, due to him pushing the system's sound chip to its absolute limits in composing it.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When RoboCop reboots, he sees an image of his wife morphing into his partner Anne Lewis, then into Dr. Lazarus. The significance of this is never explained upon. You could argue it's to establish how they are the three most important women in Murphy's life, but it's still weird.
• Cliché Storm: RoboCop 3 is a torrent of early 90's Cyberpunk cliches, including but not limited to a precocious genius hacker girl, evil Japanese corporations and their ninja androids, ultra-violent street punks, a bulldozing MegaCorp, a plucky La Résistance group, and so on.
• Complete Monster:
  • Paul McDaggett is a former soldier and the head of the Urban Rehabilitators, or "Rehabs", hired by OCP to force the people of Detroit out of their homes in order to take their land in the company's name. While claiming that he will give them new homes, McDaggett has hundreds of men, women, and children sent to death camps instead. When RoboCop and Anne Lewis stand in his way, McDaggett shoots and kills Lewis himself, framing her partner for her death to discredit him. Sending his forces to attack the rebels, leading to several deaths, McDaggett throws money into the street to manipulate kids to act as a Human Shield and facilitate his escape from RoboCop. When the police refuse to work for him anymore, McDaggett employs the Splatterpunks gang to fight against the police and sends cyborg assassins after RoboCop, later nearly shooting both young Nikko and Dr. Marie Lazarus out of prideful spite. When Marie and Nikko turn the cyborgs on each other, McDaggett reveals that he has them rigged to be a fail-safe on his bomb so that it would go off, with his only concern purely for himself and not for anything or anyone else.
  • Dean Coontz is a cowardly member of the Cadillac Heights rebellion who puts his own self-interest and greed above the lives of his people. Though initially serving the rebellion, Coontz secretly throws in with McDaggett and the Rehabs in exchange for money, and actively helps McDaggett avoid Robocop and continue to oppress Cadillac Heights. Coontz ends up selling out the rebellion base to McDaggett, knowingly sentencing hundreds of men, women, and children to death camps or immediate slaughter just to line his pockets, and he goes so far as to pull a gun on his former allies to keep them in place for the approaching Rehab death squad.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mauve Shirt La Résistance members Moreno and Bertha are decently well-liked for being both humorous and competent, and for their performers, Daniel von Bargen and C.C.H. Pounder.
  • Debbie, the news reporter played by Eva LaRue, who eventually quits rather than repeat ridiculous OCP propaganda.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: Along with Inferred Holocaust mentioned below. Child Prodigy Nikko had helped RoboCop and the resistance defeat McDaggett and the Rehabs, but her parents were killed trying to flee from OCP camps at the beginning of the film, thus she's now an orphan.
• It Was His Sled: Lewis dies.
• Inferred Holocaust:
  • At the end of the film, a thermo-failsafe explosive is set off, which destroys the OCP building in an explosion that also consumes much of the downtown Detroit area. None of the characters remark on this (as it's the end of the film), and the viewer is supposed to be happy that RoboCop and his friends stopped the corporation from bulldozing Old Detroit, while ignoring that dozens (if not hundreds) of people were just murdered in a massive explosion that took out the biggest and tallest building in the city.
  • The only real business in the city (who also operated the police department) has just exploded, and it's implied that the company that now owns OCP won't be coming back. Old Detroit is now entirely without industry and the infrastructure to maintain law and order, meaning that the crime-ridden, run-down neighborhoods the heroes were fighting so hard to keep are only going to get more run-down and more crime-ridden.
• Mis-blamed: People tend to believe that the franchise's switch to PG-13 was the biggest or even only reason of its bombing, but most of the fault can be put instead on the two-year delay the movie suffered by Orion's bankruptcy between its production and its release. Aside from the bankruptcy itself, which can be noted in how the special effects are quite lackluster compared to the previous films, two years may look like a short time, but in that short time, Jurassic Park and especially Terminator 2: Judgment Day were produced and released. For the audiences who got to watch the impressive T-1000 flow around on their screens, an actor in a tin suit doing classic robot motions would fall short forever.
• No Problem with Licensed Games: The home computer video game adaptation (IBM-PC, Amiga and Atari ST), which due to The Shelf of Movie Languishment was released a whole two years before the movie it was based upon, was actually a fair collection of minigames of various types, including impressive for its time fully 3D driving sections and even a couple of first person shooter levels that made good use of the computer mouse to faithfully replicate RoboCop's weapon targeting system as seen in the movies.
• One-Scene Wonder: Kanemitsu, the Chairman of the Kanemitsu Corporation, played by Mako.
• The Problem with Licensed Games: The home console adaptations for the Super Nintendo, NES, Master System, Mega Drive and the like however, are widely regarded as the other side of the coin, being a dull, repetitive and Nintendo Hard platform game with very little to recommend it. Except for their music perhaps...
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • A pre-Law & Order: SVU Robert John Burke as RoboCop.
  • A pre-CSI: Miami Eva LaRue stars as MediaBreak host Debbie Dix.
  • A pre-Law & Order Jill Hennessy plays Dr. Marie Lazarus.
  • A pre-The West Wing Bradley Whitford plays OCP executive Jeff Fleck.
  • Stephen Root plays the treacherous resistance member Coontz.
  • Jeff Garlin plays the donut shop clerk.
• Sequelitis: The kid-friendliness of the film marks the series' low point.
• So Bad, It's Good: After two satirical and violent films, RoboCop 3 comes in with silly things like robot ninjas and RoboCop acting like 60s Batman.
• Special Effect Failure:
  • The destruction of the OCP building and flying RoboCop. Not to say that the rest of the film's effects are good (they aren't, especially whenever Robo uses his jetpack).
  • During the RoboCop vs. Otomo fight, when the latter slices off two of Robo's fingers, it looks generally well-done. However, when he slices off Robo's lower arm, it seems like the arm has just been knocked off harmlessly instead, and the severed arm still appears to have the functions necessary to connect the gun attachment perfectly. Perhaps the fingers being cut off triggered a failsafe?
  • The dummy model used to represent Otomo whenever he's seriously damaged looks quite different to the actor playing him, especially with the dummy model's un-smile. This actually causes a weird case of bad special effects directly affecting an actor's performance: Look closely at Otomo in the climax in the part where RoboCop turns around to attack him, and you'll see that right before RoboCop turns around, the actor playing Otomo grins widely so that he looks more like the dummy model.
• Tear Jerker: The death of Lewis, who was basically Murphy's best friend, and literally dies in his arms. Made even worse by how Murphy doesn't even have time to give her a proper funeral.
• Uncertain Audience: The film's tone is like it can't decide if it's a family-friendly RoboCop or if it's an edgy Black Comedy, leading scenes that create possible Mood Whiplash. For example, the film has a scene detailing OCP laying off workers, with the use of Suicide as Comedy. This is in a film with a kid hero as one of stars in a rebel resistance against OCP's Schutzstaffel-like Rehabs. Thus, you have an Audience-Alienating Premise of a film with bits of kid-friendly whimsy like ED-209 being hacked by a kid, along with Mood Whiplash from the edgy, mature humor, along with RoboCop fighting against android ninjas.
• The Un-Twist: Considering what a Jerkass he is, few people will be surprised when Coontz sells out the rebels to OCP.

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