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Steel Justice
Robosaurus
USA 1992
produced by Stephen Lovejoy for Universal/NBC
directed by Christopher Crowe
starring Robert Taylor, J.A. Preston, Roy Brocksmith, Season Hubley, Joan Chen, John Finn, Neil Giuntoli, Geoffrey Rivas, John Toles-Bey, Jacob Vargas, Vincent Chase, Maxwell Crowe, Garvin Funches, Augie Blunt, Parker Timothy Michaels, Ken Thorley, Yuen Galen, Russell Gannon, Al Leong, Jeff O'Haco, Henry Kingi
written by Christopher Crowe, John Hill, music by Frank Becker
review by Mike Haberfelner
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Cop Nash (Robert Taylor) is on the trail of armsdealers who might have
been involved in the murder of his own son Davey (Maxwell Crowe) - but his
investigations lead exactly nowhere. Furthermore he is plagued by
nightmares that have to do with the death of his son and involve the boy's
toy robot-dinosaur and a mysterious black man (J.A.Preston). Then he meets
the black man, a certain Jeremiah Jones, in real life, and Jeremiah talks all
sorts of weird nonsense about Nash having the gift of transformation and
so on. Nash doesn't believe a word, but fact is his son's robot-dinosaur
has started acting weird, inasmuch as it has started to move around on its
own and seems to have developed some kind of intelligence - it even saves
Nash's life once when removing a timebomb some baddies have planted in his
appartment. Finally, in another dream, Nash has figured out the identity
of the baddies, a transportation company run by one Colonel Duggins (Roy
Brocksmith), and when his superiors are unwilling to support his line of
investigation, he decides to go against Duggins and company on his own in
a suicide mission. But just when he's about to do something really
stupid, Jeremiah Jones shows up and tells him to really concentrate in
order to become the master of his gift and wipe out the baddies.
And wouldn't you know it, Nash's gift is to transform his son's small
robot dinosaur into a three storeys-high steel monster that takes care of
all the baddies for him ... case solved. There are some things
to like about this TV-pilot that never got made into a series: It's
presentation of a future world might not make much sense on a narrative
level but is rather well conceived, the directorial effort is not exactly
great, but solid (especially for TV's lowered standards), and the decision
to use a full-scale robot dinosaur in the finale instead of a miniature or
(even worse) CGI effects results in a few impressive scenes. That all
said however, as a whole the film is rather ridiculous, I mean how can a
cop movie featuring a giant steel dinosaur be taken seriously? And how
come director and co-writer Christopher Crowe has totally failed to notice
the ironic potential of his narrative? And unfortunately, the film doesn't
even work in the so bad it's good-department, it's just a bit of an
oddity - and oddity not necessarily in a good way ...
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