The time is the future, which looks a lot like 1990s Los Angeles. Because of out of control crime, the police have been deemed useless and have been defunded. (Like that could ever happen in real life!) Seeing a need and a decent profit margin, private enterprise has stepped up. The law is enforced by C.O.P.S., which stands for Civilian Operated Police Systems. Not held back by the Constitution or any oversight at all, C.O.P.S. has become just as corrupt and dangerous as the criminals that it battles. When a reporter named Marion (Anna Rapagna) threatens to do a story about the out of control C.O.P.S., the head of the company hacks the justice system and puts out a warrant for Marion on the charge of treason. Because of the seriousness of the charge, the bounty hunters of C.O.P.S. don’t have to bring her in alive to get paid. In fact, they are encouraged to bring her in dead.
Tucker (David Carradine) is weary and disillusioned member of C.O.P.S. but he is still enough of an idealist that he wants to arrest Marion without killing her. When he discovers that Marion is being set up, Tucker goes out of his way to protect her from the evil Becker (Robert Tessier) and all the other C.O.P.S. It turns out to be pretty easy because Tucker is apparently the only members of C.O.P.S. who isn’t terrible at his job. Helping Tucker out is a wheelchair-bound hacker named Billy (D.C. Douglas) and a robotic glove that can shoot laser beams.
A Robocop rip-off that lacks that film’s satiric bite, Future Force takes place in a future where everyone drives cars from the 70s and where every bar is a strip club that looks like it could have been used in the type of movies that used to show up on late night Cinemax. It’s a future of empty warehouses, deserted streets, and fires in trash cans. Robot glove aside, the movie’s future is unconvincing even by the standards of 1989. There’s a lot of car chases and strange gunfights where no one seems to be aiming at each other but there’s also many scenes that were added to pad out the movie’s running time. Marion gets upset when Tucker ruthlessly kills two people who were trying to kill her but she barely shrugs when she later discovers that the bad guys have killed her sister. As bad the movie is, give some respect, though, to David Carradine whose general air of “I don’t want to be here, just give me my paycheck so I can go home,” fits his character like a glove.
Through the Shattered Lens 