Is Tom Noonan the True Star of Robocop 2?

RoboPimp · PIMPY SUPREME

My best friend in college is suitemates with Tom Noonan's son, so I am always pestering him for inside info. One thing he told me is that Tom Noonan is kinda bitter about being typecast, having played at least five pedophiles to date. I have always thought that Robocop 2 was his finest moment in the sun, and I think so now more than ever. Robocop 2 is literally named after his character. Sure, he plays a villain, but at least it is a layered character that develops and changes greatly throughout the film. Not to mention it is a great performance that was so different from Kurtwood Smith's Clarence that it's hard to say who is truly the better or more iconic villain. It would be interesting to study Robocop 2 and see who gets more screen time, Robocop or Cain. If you count scenes of the Robocop 2 unit running rampant, it would probably be pretty close. There's the scene of Robocop and his wife but there's also the scene of Cain torturing Duffy. And of course the two share plenty of screen time together. Now, villains almost never get top billing, so Peter Weller as the star and Nancy Allen as the costar follow convention. But on the poster I had for Robocop 2 Daniel O'Herily had higher billing than Tom Noonan! Now, no disrespect to any of these fine actors, but isn't Tom Noonan and his character both more important and on screen more than Allen or O'Herily? The movie is named after his character (sort of), after all. It should be Weller - Noonan at the top to me, but anyway, I just wanted to write this little post showing love to what may be considered by history as Tom Noonan's opus.

Stan The Man · Bah Concepts Division

Might post more on this later but in a nutshell.. If you're following through from the reasoning about the previous 'RoboCop 2' topic, then yes you could consider Noonan the true star of the film. I would anyway, again, following from that prior topic's logic. In any case I do consider Cain to be a vital and prominent character certainly, beyond that, I'd rather not delve into too much into value judgment.

That said, Weller and Allen are the lead actor and actress respectively, the leads always get top billing. I'd have no problem with putting Noonan right after though, but O'Herilhy is a more senior actor and that probably weighs in. Bah, for the most part it seems to be all rather arbitrary stuff on the part of a kooky combo of the script and screenwriters, production/studio and/or actors unions that dictate that kinda shit.
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RoboDemise · What's all this then?

Frankensteins monster in Dekkers movie was awesome in that flick and in R2. He was also amazing in last action hero. He would have stolen the show if they didn't chop him down to nothing. Noonan is great in everything I have seen him in,

HOB888 · O-L5

artuditu · mio Cid

I think Robo and Cain are on par with each other. But since Cain is the newer character introduced in this movie it might look like he shines more.

The movie follows the transformation of both, Cain into R2, Robo into politically correct or PG Robo. We see Robo get disassembled and rebuilt, we see Cain get his brain surgically removed and he is put inside R2. There are a lot of parallelisms for which I would credit Frank Miller.

Interesting, when Robo gets turned into PG Robo, Cain almost disappears from the movie, until Robo reprogramms himself and first thing he goes chasing Cain again. Then when RoboCain is built, Robo totally gets out of the picture. Then we almost immediately have the final showdown with both of them. Also both of them have freed themselves from Faxxx control and her directives.

Also they both got scenes deleted from the final cut that further developed their personal arcs, internal struggles and motivations.

Edd 209 · C-L1

We should have an alternative dvd release with just robocain on the front cover under the Robocop 2 banner...
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RoboPimp · PIMPY SUPREME

Completely off topic but here are some Tom Noonan facts I learned from his son: Tom Noonan sits around the house smoking weed in an oversized T-Shirt writing plays and making bizarre musical compositions such as "I'll Look Where I Want", based on a time someone told him to stop looking at a scantily dressed lass. He often hands out CD's of his music as party gifts, wrapped in tinfoil rather than regular wrapping paper. Oh, and he "hated" making Robocop 2 because he likes to do weird motions with his body onscreen which his character was incapable of due to the CGI face on a robot body. But when I told his son I was excited to see him in the upcoming RoboDoc he was not surprised he was going to be in because he will reportedly do anything for a buck. And when you have played at least five pedophiles on screen it makes sense. But let's not forget Tom Noonan wrote, directed, and starred in, and composed the music for The Wife, a film co-starring his now ex-wife which is the now quaker mother of Tom Noonan's son whom I had the pleasure of conversing with one drunken eve.

Maxlee · C-L1

With the movie title representing both the series' sequel (part 2) as well as the final villain "RoboCop 2" and well, effectively all the bazillion plot threads of the film coming together when OCP builds "RoboCop 2", there certainly seems to be some important fixation on Cain himself.

It's a shame RoboCop 2 the movie was put in a blender during production and a lot of Cain's scenes and characteristics were cut.

Now that I'm older I can see some more angles of Cain, as a self-deluded god-persona in his Nuke emperium, but as a kid I just saw him as "that druglord guy".

Another missed opportunity here is the fully mirrored angle of RoboCop, a robot, spending the entire movie to become human, whereas Cain, a human, spends the entire movie to become a robot.

And there's this fanfiction bit where instead of the dismemberment into crazy directives into Cain hospitalized, you'd get RoboCop vs Cain (perhaps with Cain in a helicopter like in one of the early scripts) resulting in Cain hospitalized and RoboCop in a damaged shambled mess. We then get a sequence where RoboCop needs repairs, while Cain gets transformed into RoboCain. You can basically have the two lie side by side on operating tables at OCP !

RoboJOF · Sgt-L4

Whoa! Deep Maxlee: Robocop becoming a man, Cain becoming a robot. . . I never thought of that parallel before. Just another reason to not dismiss this movie as the typical Hollywood sequel. Sure, it got re-edited, re-written and re-envisioned by several people but the central theme is there: Robocop 2, another robot (twisted by drugs) on an evil path to contend with the returning hero from the first movie. Throw in all the OCP, police department, drug dealing background stuff and this is what you get in the end, but at the heart, this movie has a lot going on.
Back to the present conversation: I like the idea of having Noonan receive the nod for his role in the film. He certainly plays just as much a human part as Weller did in the first movie. My criticism would be that RoboCain was too one-dimensional. Little humanity, just a raging junkie in a super-powered robot body. It might have been neat to see Cain find himself again in his new form, perhaps there was the slightest glimpse of this when he runs into his old girlfriend (name escapes me). But then he goes and kills her and Cain is gone. I guess that just lends more to the notion that Robocop is unique and not easily recreated. Either way, Noonan's acting was good, perhaps a little overacted. He does come off as a mastermind, but so much of his time on screen has him doping up or saying and doing nothing, you don't get much to work with.
I am sure O'Herlihy and Allen were named above Noonan because they were returning stars from the first movie. On screen time probably had nothing to do with it. However, the Old Man played a much bigger role in this film than the original (whether that was a good choice or a bad one is a different question altogether).

RoboBrand87 · R-L2

Noonan was one of the things I loved RoboCop 2. I adore the whole: "Did you think it was me that beat you?" scene. He's quite scary and I think the cut scenes should have been left in. I would say the true star of RoboCop 2 is Belinda.

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