Have you ever wondered if Robocop would be better if, instead of Peter Weller in the starring role, it was a sexy Japanese woman? Me neither, but someone in Japan apparently did, because they made Lady Battle Cop.

I first heard of this film after seeing .gifs passed around Twitter and Discord showing off the costume. It’s like a cross between Robocop and a Power Ranger, and even includes high heels and what could be described as cyber stockings. It’s great, and the main reason to watch the film.

However, the rest of the film is merely okay, so you can get most of the value from it with an image search and watching some .gifs. It’s available free on YouTube so watch the entire film if time doesn’t matter to you.


-The Plot-
A criminal cartel called the cartel is taking over neo-tokyo. A man builds a cyborg cop to take back the city, all he needs is a doner body. The lab is attacked by the cartel and the man and his fiancee are mortally wounded. The woman demands her fiance use her as a doner. He does so, reluctantly, before dying of his own injuries. She then goes out for revenge both against the hit squad that blew up the lab, and the cartel leader that ordered the hit. I noticed she’s not technically a cop.

Oh, and ED-209 is now a bodybuilder with telekinetic powers.

As you might have noticed, the film is not a 1 to 1 remake of Robocop. It takes the core concept of someone being killed and turned into a cyborg policeman and does it’s own thing. The film lacks the grit and the satire of Robocop, which is fine. It also lacks the budget, but rarely come across as cheap.

-The Problem-
While individual elements are fine, the films biggest problem is it’s structure. If you have any serious interest in film, you’ve likely heard of the Hollywood formula/the monomyth/the hero's journey/the three act structure. It’s a common way for stories to be laid out. While it might be an interesting thought experiment to try and imagine a film that doesn’t follow the formula, once you don’t have it you realise why so many films use that template.

Lady Battle Cop kind of follows the formula, but it moves things around. The end result is a film that can feel weird and disjointed, sometimes it feels like a scene is missing or has been moved to a different part of the film.

It’s hard to do an apples to apples comparison, but I’ll explain it like this. Imagine if in James Bond: Goldeneye, Sean Bean is killed off a third of the way into the film, and Ourumov doesn’t do anything the entire film apart from sitting in his office making phone calls. Or if in Indiana Jones: The Last Crusade, after the young Indie scene, we get a 10-15 minute scene showing the nazi lady going through college.

-Result-
As said, Lady Battle Cop is okay, or above average. The costume is good and some of the action is fun. The bizarre structure does lead to some surprises. At one point I was starting to doubt the woman from the start was going to be Lady Battle Cop because there’s such a long time between her supposed death and her showing up.

I feel bad being so negative here. It’s memorable, and rarely got boring, but there’s not enough substance for me to recommend it unless you want 80 minutes of a woman walking around in sexy robocop cosplay fighting a telepathic body builder, and let’s be honest, who doesn’t want that?

At very least, I think it’s worth a google image search, or finding some .gifs of the action scenes.