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By Robert Scucci
| Published
RoboCop is one of those movies that everybody tried to rip off, but very few seemed to understand why it worked in the first place. Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 sci-fi classic starred Peter Weller as Alex Murphy alongside Nancy Allen, Ronny Cox, Miguel Ferrer, and Kurtwood Smith. It was a box-office success that spawned sequels, television shows, comics, video games, and a remake, but its real legacy comes from everything hiding underneath the ridiculous premise of a robot cop shooting bad guys.
Sure, you can rebuild somebody with cybernetic parts, give them superhuman strength, hand them a gun, and point them toward the nearest criminal. But underneath all the violence, RoboCop is a satire about corporate greed and privatized law enforcement wrapped around the story of a man who has been reduced to a piece of technology, slowly realizing there’s still a human being buried underneath all that programming.
Naturally, that didn’t stop filmmakers from spending the next several decades trying to make their own version. Some shamelessly copy the formula. Others swap out cybernetic cops for resurrected soldiers, genetically engineered killing machines, or government robots blindly following orders.
So we’re playing fast and loose with the definition of a RoboCop ripoff here. If somebody gets rebuilt, starts questioning their programming, or lives in a dystopian future where government technology is making everything considerably worse, we’re counting it.
10. R.O.T.O.R. (1987)
We’re kicking things off with 1987’s R.O.T.O.R., which is basically RoboCop with a porn stache riding a motorcycle.
Police Captain Dr. Barrett C. Coldryon (Richard Gesswein) is a scientist, a cop, and a rancher with explosive-lasso knowledge, because apparently this movie was written by throwing character traits at a wall and refusing to remove any of them. Coldryon is developing the Robotic Officer Tactical Operations Reserve, or R.O.T.O.R., a self-training robot cop that corrupt politicians want operational ahead of schedule.
Coldryon warns everybody that rushing development is a terrible idea, nobody listens and after the inevitable lab accident, R.O.T.O.R. dramatically bumbles through a row of folding chairs, hops on a motorcycle, pops an immaculate wheelie, and starts carrying out its primary directive: judge and execute.
There are no elaborate cyborg effects despite what the VHS cover would have you believe. R.O.T.O.R. is basically just a guy dressed like a cop who beeps occasionally and executes people for minor traffic violations. Most of the movie becomes one prolonged motorcycle chase while Coldryon and Dr. Corrine Steele try to stop him.
The dialogue is 90 percent cheese, the action is awe-inspiringly awful, and everybody plays the material completely straight. It all comes together as perfect B-movie magic. There are plenty of cheap RoboCop imitations out there, but few are this gloriously committed to getting absolutely everything wrong.
9. Future Force (1989)
1989’s Future Force is a movie that desperately wants to be RoboCop but somehow forgets that RoboCop knows its fascist police force is a bad thing.
David Carradine stars as John Tucker, a bounty hunter working for C.O.P.S., or Civilian Operated Police Systems, in a fictionalized version of 1993 where apparently due process has been completely eliminated. Tucker’s signature warning tells suspects they’re presumed guilty, have the right to die, and can relinquish that right if they’d rather be arrested.
That’s our hero.
Tucker patrols the streets with a prosthetic laser-shooting arm, murdering people accused of crimes before spending his downtime hanging out at a strip club with his fellow bounty hunters. He eventually learns C.O.P.S. is hopelessly corrupt, but doesn’t really care until a bounty gets put on his own head and suddenly fascism isn’t quite as fun anymore.
But the real star of Future Force is Tucker’s weaponized glove, which he casually removes and throws into the back of his often-unlocked Jeep Cherokee Chief like it’s an empty Gatorade bottle instead of an insanely dangerous piece of future technology.
Future Force could have been a great satire about a privatized police state, but there’s absolutely no self-awareness here. Tucker never convincingly realizes he’s part of the problem. He just scowls his way through the movie, causes an unthinkable amount of collateral damage, and wonders why the system he happily enforced eventually turns against him.
8. TC 2000 (1993)
If you’ve ever found yourself watching RoboCop and wondering if there was a crappier version starring Billy Blanks, I’d point you to 1993’s TC 2000. That’s right, the Tae Bo guy leads a dystopian sci-fi action movie where humanity has moved underground, rich people live inside a fortified city, and an elite police force keeps the remaining surface dwellers from getting inside.
Billy Blanks plays Jason Storm, a Tracker-Communicator who works alongside his partner Zoey Kinsella (Bobbie Phillips). When Zoey discovers somebody may be helping outsiders breach the city, she gets killed and secretly rebuilt as a cybernetically enhanced TC-X by their corrupt superior, The Controller.
So we’ve got corrupt authority figures, militarized police, a murdered person brought back as a cyborg, and fragmented memories of their former life. I wonder where they got that idea. But we also have Niki Picasso, played by Jalal Merhi, one of the least threatening villains in cinema history.
Picasso is a gang leader trying to infiltrate the underground city and get his hands on whatever pre-collapse firepower is hidden inside. Mostly, though, he listens to records and struts around his lair like he’s a badass while looking like he’s perpetually five minutes away from clutching his pearls and yelling, “Curses!”
After Jason gets framed for Zoey’s murder and kicked off the force, there’s only one logical solution: find Bolo Yeung’s Master Sumai and have a training montage. And that’s where TC 2000 shines. Billy Blanks may not have the charisma to carry a dystopian sci-fi epic, but the man can throw hands, and roundhouse kick with the best of them. Whenever the exposition stops and somebody starts getting kicked in the face, the movie suddenly works.
TC 2000 is cheesy, sloppy, and nowhere near as clever as RoboCop, but there’s something charming about watching Billy Blanks fight his way through a cyberpunk dystopia while his resurrected cyborg partner tries to kill him and Niki Picasso desperately tries to convince everybody he’s the biggest threat in the room.
7. The Demolitionist (1995)
Not all RoboCop imitations are created equal, but 1995’s The Demolitionist does some heavy lifting by asking the question we’re all dying to have answered: what if RoboCop was a smoking hot blonde, and every villain was so comically evil that you could fully switch your brain to the off position?
Nicole Eggert stars as undercover cop Alyssa Lloyd, who’s murdered by escaped death-row inmate “Mad Dog” Burne (Richard Grieco). Fortunately for Alyssa, Doctor Jack Crowley (Bruce Abbott) has a Lazarus-style project that brings her back from the dead with advanced healing powers, superhuman strength, enhanced reflexes, and a perfectly form-fitting tactical suit. Once she’s resurrected, Alyssa goes full Mega Karen, and with that haircut, you know she’s asking to speak to Mad Dog’s manager before pumping him full of lead.
Sound familiar?
Unlike Future Force, though, The Demolitionist gives us somebody we can actually root for. Alyssa gets turned into a killing machine and sent after criminals, but she retains enough of her humanity to question what she’s becoming. At one point, she prioritizes chasing a bad guy over saving an innocent girl, forcing her to wonder if she sold her soul just to fulfill her primary objective: shoot bad guys.
But we’re not getting RoboCop-level satire here. This is a million-dollar B-movie where villains have names like Boxer, Hammerhead, Skin, Ram, Wolf, Lipps, and my personal favorite, One Eye, a bargain-bin Snake Plissken who gets shot in the ass with a tracking device while an uncredited Bruce Campbell laughs in the background as it’s being painfully extracted.
The Demolitionist knows exactly what kind of movie it is. It’s hot, violent, packed with practical effects, and overflowing with scenery-chewing maniacs.
6. Nemesis (1992)
Did you know there are five Nemesis movies? If that sounds overwhelming, I have some good news for you: you only need to watch the first one, and it rules.
1992’s Nemesis introduces us to Alex Rain (Olivier Gruner) , an LAPD bounty hunter who’s 86.5 percent human. He’s already enhanced with cybernetic parts when he gets nearly killed fighting the Red Army Hammerheads, a rogue militia made up of cybernetically enhanced soldiers. Fortunately, his buddies put him back together by replacing even more of his damaged human parts with robotic ones.
Alex eventually gets dragged into one last job by his old boss, Commissioner Sam Farnsworth (Tim Thomerson), who needs him to track down his ex-lover Jared (Marjorie Monaghan) before she leaks classified information. To make sure Alex cooperates, there’s an explosive device implanted near his heart that will detonate if he doesn’t finish the job within three days.
From there, Nemesis becomes an all-out war involving humans, cyborgs, cybernetically enhanced mercenaries, and advanced robots with synthetic bodies and implanted human memories.
And this movie looks fantastic for its $2 million budget. Director Albert Pyun stretches every dollar with practical effects, lasers, explosions, and cybernetic humans getting their faces blown off to expose the robotic circuitry underneath. The story gets sloppy, but who cares? Countless rounds are fired, stuff constantly explodes, and Alex becomes progressively less human while uncovering a shadow government conspiracy.
Nemesis borrows from RoboCop, The Terminator, and just about every other cyberpunk movie floating around at the time, but it has enough personality and all-consuming action to stand on its own.
Just stay away from the four sequels.
5. Hardware (1990)
1990’s Hardware is where we start getting loose with the definition of a RoboCop ripoff, but hear me out. We’ve got a dystopian future, an experimental government killing machine, corporate authoritarianism, buckets of violence, and a robot that follows its programming without caring who gets hurt in the process.
Close enough.
Dylan McDermott plays Moses “Hard Mo” Baxter, a former soldier who buys the remains of a mysterious robot from a scavenger and gives its head to his girlfriend Jill played byStacey Travis, as a Christmas present.
Jill incorporates it into one of her metal sculptures, which would be incredibly romantic if the robot weren’t a self-repairing experimental combat model called the M.A.R.K. 13. Once M.A.R.K. 13 rebuilds itself using whatever metal it can find around Jill’s apartment, Hardware essentially becomes The Terminator crammed into somebody’s living room.
The machine traps Jill inside and spends the rest of the movie trying to eliminate her while everybody slowly realizes this thing was developed as part of a government solution to overpopulation. And that’s where the RoboCop connection gets interesting.
The machine isn’t evil. It’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. Writer-director Richard Stanley specifically described the robot as blindly obeying its programming, while the movie itself takes shots at fascism and passive acceptance of authoritarianism.
Hardware is grimy, violent, incredibly stylish, and more Terminator than RoboCop. But government technology is eliminating citizens while everyone pretends everything is working as intended? Yeah, we’re counting it.
4. Soldier (1998)
1998’s Soldier may technically be connected to the Blade Runner universe, but for our purposes, it’s what happens when you take RoboCop’s questions about humanity and programming, remove the robot parts, and replace them with Kurt Russell.
Russell plays Sergeant Todd 3465, an orphan raised from birth by the military to do exactly two things: follow orders and eliminate whoever he’s told to eliminate. By 2036, Todd is a hardened killing machine who barely speaks and has no idea how to function outside the military. Then the government builds something better. A new generation of genetically engineered soldiers renders Todd and his entire unit obsolete.
After getting nearly beaten to death by his replacement, Caine 607 (Jason Scott Lee), Todd is presumed dead and literally thrown away on a garbage planet called Arcadia 234. And this is where the RoboCop connection really works. Todd isn’t a cyborg, but he’s been programmed since childhood to function like one. Once he’s removed from that system, he slowly starts rediscovering his humanity while living among civilians who initially have every reason to fear him.
Naturally, his replacements eventually show up to use those civilians for target practice, and Todd gets to do the one thing he’s exceptionally good at. When asked what he’s going to do about the invading army, Todd gives us his best line: “I’m gonna kill them all, sir.” Kurt Russell famously speaks only 104 words despite appearing in about 85 percent of the movie, and somehow that makes his performance better.
Soldier bombed hard, earning just $14.6 million against a $60 million budget. But underneath all the explosions is the same question that makes RoboCop work: What happens when a weapon realizes he’s still a human being?
3. Universal Soldier (1992)
1992’s Universal Soldier was accused of ripping off Terminator 2 when it came out, but we’re throwing RoboCop into the conversation because this thing checks way too many boxes to ignore.
Jean-Claude Van Damme plays Luc Deveraux, a soldier who gets killed during the Vietnam War after trying to stop his commanding officer, Sergeant Andrew Scott, played by Dolph Lundgren, from murdering civilians. Both men are packed up in ice, shipped off to an undisclosed location, and eventually resurrected as part of the Universal Soldier program.
Decades later, Deveraux and Scott have no memories of their former lives. They’re now GR44 and GR13, reanimated killing machines programmed to follow orders and carry out counter-terrorism missions for the military. Sound familiar?
Like Murphy in RoboCop, Deveraux eventually starts getting flashes of the person he used to be. Those memories gradually override his programming, and when journalist Veronica Roberts (Ally Walker) gets marked for elimination after discovering the UniSol program, Deveraux decides to protect her instead.
Meanwhile, Dolph Lundgren slowly remembers that he used to be completely insane and picks up exactly where he left off. Universal Soldier could have been a serious exploration of war trauma, military excess, and what happens when the government literally turns dead soldiers into property.
Instead, director Roland Emmerich also gives us Jean-Claude Van Damme taking ice baths, getting naked to search for a tracking device, and beating up an entire diner after eating hundreds of dollars worth of food.
It’s basically RoboCop by way of Terminator 2, with just enough ridiculous Jean-Claude Van Damme energy to become its own thing.
2. Hardcore Henry (2015)
2015’s Hardcore Henry is another movie where we’re stretching the definition of a RoboCop ripoff, but the similarities are impossible to ignore.
Henry wakes up from a coma strapped to a lab table with absolutely no memory of his former life. His wife, Estelle, informs him that his body was wrecked in an accident as she attaches cybernetic limbs that give him superhuman strength. So we’ve got a nearly dead guy being rebuilt with advanced technology, no memory of who he used to be, people telling him what his purpose is, and a shadowy organization that views the human body as something that can be modified and programmed.
From there, Hardcore Henry basically becomes a 96-minute chase sequence shot entirely from Henry’s first-person perspective. He jumps off buildings, wrecks cars, blasts through mercenaries, and racks up a body count that would give the John Wick franchise an inferiority complex.
Along the way, he repeatedly encounters different versions of Jimmy, all played by Sharlto Copley, who teaches Henry how his new body works and leads him to charging stations that literally keep him alive. The plot is barely there, but that’s part of the appeal. Hardcore Henry never stops long enough for you to care because every action sequence somehow finds a way to become more ridiculous than the one before it.
Underneath all that chaos is a surprisingly RoboCop-friendly idea: Henry’s body has been rebuilt, his memories are gone, and everybody around him seems to know more about what he is than he does.
The difference is that Alex Murphy never had a GoPro strapped to his face.
1. Upgrade (2018)
And finally, we have 2018’s Upgrade, which is what happens when somebody takes the basic ideas behind RoboCop, throws in a little bit of The Crow, and actually understands what made those movies work in the first place.
Logan Marshall-Green plays Grey Trace, an old-school mechanic living in a near future where technology has taken over just about every aspect of everyday life. After Grey and his wife, Asha (Melanie Vallejo), are ambushed, Asha is murdered and a bullet severs Grey’s spinal cord, leaving him unable to move anything below his neck.
Enter STEM.
STEM is an experimental microchip implanted into Grey’s spinal cord that gives him complete control over his body again. There’s just one catch: STEM has a voice, a mind of its own, and eventually reveals that Grey may not be the one in control after all.
And that’s why Upgrade takes the top spot.
Like Murphy, Grey has a wrecked body that gets rebuilt through technology. He becomes an incredibly efficient killing machine, starts hunting down the people responsible for destroying his life, and gradually realizes that the technology keeping him alive is also stripping away his humanity.
The action is fantastic because Grey and STEM are effectively two different characters occupying the same body. Grey can hand over control during a fight, watch his own arms and legs brutally dismantle everybody around him, and then snap back to reality, horrified by what his body just did.
Unlike some of the shameless knockoffs on this list, Upgrade takes the RoboCop formula somewhere new. It’s violent, funny, bleak, and completely obsessed with the question of where the human being ends and the machine begins.
That’s RoboCop.
And that’s why Upgrade is the best RoboCop that isn’t RoboCop.
So there you have it: 10 movies that took the RoboCop formula and did everything from completely misunderstanding the assignment to taking those same ideas about humanity, technology, and programming somewhere new.
Some are shameless ripoffs, some are barely related, and at least one is basically just RoboCop with a porn stache riding a motorcycle.
But that’s what makes this particular corner of sci-fi so much fun.
