Robocop: Citizen’s Arrest

Brian Wood has turned out some good work on licensed titles, including “Star Wars,” “Conan,” and “Aliens,” over at Dark Horse, so checking out his take on “Robocop” from BOOM! was a no-brainer for me.  “Citizen’s Arrest” takes place thirty years after the events of the first movie with a resurgent Omni Consumer Products that has taken over all public services in Detroit.  Chief among these is the new R/Cop app which allows citizens to report crimes and get rewarded for it. The app is enforced by OCP’s automated police force one which the original Robocop, Alex Murphy, is not a part of.  They overwrote his programming to send him into forced retirement leaving him to haunt the run-down suburb where he lives like a mechanical ghost. That changes when former cop Leo Reza tries to look him up and enlist his help against the ruthless gentrification efforts of OCP.

There are parts of this story that work just fine.  The opening issue does a good job establishing the current state of affairs, with the application of the R/Cop app coming off more believable than it should, and makes Leo a sympathetic co-protagonist.  Then things slowly start to spiral off the rails. OCP’s logic for leaving Robocop active comes off as laughably foolish even by standards of corporate arrogance. The late-game effort to give the title character a partner of sorts and it comes off as far too rushed for it to have the emotional impact it should.  Most annoying are the constant in-story cutaways to the media’s talking heads who offer blithely ignorant commentary on the events of the plot. This is a direct callback to the biting satire of the first film, but it only distracts from the story here due to the frequency of said cutaways. Not helping any of this is the fairly bland art from Jorge Coelho.  “Citizen’s Arrest” had promise at the start and some bits that occasionally work, yet it just winds up being kind of a mess in the end.