YMMV / RoboCop: Prime Directives

• Audience-Alienating Era: It was intended by the creators to pull the franchise out of the one it's been in with RoboCop 3, The Series, and Alpha Commando, but many fans felt that despite the return to the dark tone of the first two movies, it didn't help.
• Complete Monster:
  • The Motor City Mangler, only appearing in a flashback in "Dark Justice", is a cocky, cannibalistic Serial Killer who kidnaps young women and grinds them into sausage and ribs, having done so to many. When Alex Murphy and John T. Cable investigate his house, the Mangler holds Cable at gunpoint and forces Murphy to drop his gun. Once Murphy complies, the Mangler tries to shoot both him and Cable.
  • Dr. David Kaydick, an unspeakably petty ex-OCP scientist fired for his grotesque experiments on human subjects, uses this as justification for attempting to bring about the death of the entire human race through the LEGION "bio-tech" virus. A monster to his own family, Kaydick kept his own wife as a slave via means of an electric neurochip, and gleefully attempts to murder both her and their own young daughter Jordan in the present after having used Jordan as an incubator for LEGION. Kaydick uses a Shock Collar to force Alex Murphy's partner Cable into becoming his personal killing machine, and when he attempts to break into the OCP HQ with its uncooperative security executive as his hostage, Kaydick comes close to gouging out her eyes to get past the scanners.
• Harsher in Hindsight: The treatment of the police's "non-lethal" deescalation policy as utterly ridiculous and enabling criminals. Many people would right now find the idea of a police force without lethal weapons to be a welcome change as controversies over Police Brutality grow.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • At various points in the series, the line "The world only makes sense when you force it to," is quoted, which originates from Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. This was done in tribute to Frank Miller, who wrote that comic and also drafts of RoboCop 2 and 3, along with several RoboCop comic books. Peter Weller, the original RoboCop, would eventually voice the originator of that quote, Bruce Wayne himself, in the animated adaptation.
  • RoboCop (2014) took some flack for featuring an all-black suit that seemed to make RoboCop look more like Batman, and also for making fun of the original gray, saying it looked outdated. This series provides a black-suited RoboCop that is also meant to be a replacement for the gray-suited one, albeit one that adheres closer to the original design.
• Narm: How both Page Fletcher and Maurice Dean Wint moved in the suits were seen as many fans as ridiculous.
• Narm Charm: As earnestly bad as a lot of the things about the miniseries are, you can't help but enjoy how completely over-the-top and unrealistic it gets, even by RoboCop standards.
• Questionable Casting: Many fans reacted negatively to Page Fletcher as Murphy. Among the reasons were the fact that he was shorter than most of the other cast members or even the other actors to play the role (whereas both Peter Weller and Robert John Burke were tall and Richard Eden as of average height) and how Fletcher moved in the suit.
• Special Effect Failure: Most of the effects are pretty lame, but special mention goes to a scene in "Crash and Burn" where RoboCable's butt-plate is barely attached (it must have come loose when they were wrestling in the zen pond).