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I have to admit something. It’s a little embarrassing, and from it you might make some assumptions about my parents. Despite their attitudes about respect, responsibility, accountability, and integrity, they did let me slide on a few things.

They let me watch rated-R movies from an early age.

I saw RoboCop 2 when I was four—maybe five—years old. And if you’re being honest, it was probably the only responsible thing to do. I was such a huge fan of the first film that my Dad just had to let me see the sequel.

I say all of that to say this: despite my rose-colored memories of the film, it’s a lesser movie than the first and a flawed movie in general.

I still love it.

I like the good parts and love the flaws.

Picking up sometime after the first film, Detroit has only gotten worse. The heartless megacorporation Omni Consumer Products—OCP—is still the de facto government and is intentionally bleeding the city dry in an exaggerated (though not by much) version of gentrification. They still want to move forward with their urban-renewal utopia: Delta City. To make that happen, they’ve driven the police force to strike, effectively allowing crime to run the streets.

RoboCop still patrols the city because—well—he’s a cyborg, and pensions and benefits don’t mean anything to him.

This time he’s up against Cain, a drug dealer, cult leader, and all-around lunatic played by the late Tom Noonan. Cain and his crew manufacture and sell “Nuke,” this world’s version of crack cocaine. His gang is full of colorful characters, including a child named Hob, played by Gabriel Damon. Damon, a child actor in the late ’80s and early ’90s, portrays a disturbingly violent young drug dealer.

To complicate things, OCP wants to make RoboCop a little more family-friendly. Corporate interests conspire to reprogram him, and in a bit of black comedy RoboCop spends his time lecturing a Little League team for stealing from a store and opening fire on a man for smoking a cigarette. The reprogramming is played for laughs and, while funny, feels a little out of place.

This is where I think RoboCop 2 fails as a film—though that failure isn’t misguided so much as it is pointed. Let me explain.

The corporate officers making decisions about RoboCop and the police force are clearly analogues for movie executives. The first film was a huge hit, especially with kids, and there was pressure to make the sequel more family-friendly. The film mocks and rejects the idea that RoboCop should be something made for children. It then doubles down by including some of the most violent scenes in the movie’s second half—violence that stands out even in an era famous for over-the-top action films.

The commentary about corporate greed, the military-industrial complex, gentrification, and the war on drugs ends up taking a back seat to the creative team’s apparent gripes with the studio. The black comedy and satire are still there—ghoulish commercials about sunscreen that causes cancer, lethal anti-car-theft devices, and artificial organs the size of CRT monitors sold with the enthusiasm of a George Foreman Grill pitchman. But it rings a little hollow compared to the superior first film, which had a much tighter narrative.

With that said… I love the violence.

This movie is absolutely bonkers when it comes to gunplay and action. The final showdown—and the eventual death of the main villain—is so insane that I won’t do you the disservice of spoiling it. Honestly, I’m not even sure I could accurately explain what I witnessed—not because I lack the facts, but because I lack the words to fully capture the madness of it.

RoboCop 2 is probably the worst movie I love completely unironically.