When RoboCop premiered in 1987, at first glance it could have easily been mistaken for another low-budget, gimmicky sci-fi thriller quickly thrown together to make a couple of bucks before hitting the video shelves and falling into obscurity. It was directed by Paul Verhoeven, who had been making waves in his native Holland since the early 1970s, but was largely unknown to American audiences outside the art-film circuit. RoboCop looked like shallow B-movie cheese all over, from the poster design, to the tag line (“Part man. Part machine. All cop”), to the goofy title (Verhoeven reportedly tossed the script after reading the title page). However, when audiences went to see it, they were surprised to find a brilliantly constructed, darkly humorous comic book revenge fantasy laced with a subversive subtext of satirical jabs at American corporate domination and predatory capitalism—heady stuff, indeed.

The story takes place sometime in the near future in Detroit, the city whose massive steel mills and assembly plants once stood for the grand possibilities of American manufacturing power. However, when the film opens, Detroit is sagging: Riddled by crime and lagging in industrial output, the city has become so dysfunctional and crime-ridden that the government has turned to a private corporation, Omni Consumer Products (OCP), to manage the police departments. OCP, which is run by a serious old businessman referred to only as The Old Man (Dan O’Herlihy), is in the midst of its own struggles. Dick Jones (Ronny Cox), an older vice president who is losing his edge, is locked in boardroom battle with Bob Morton (Miguel Ferrer), a hotshot young executive who wants to take his place at any cost. Jones’s solution to Detroit’s crime problem is a massive, militaristic robot, ED-209, which is brought to life with stunning stop-motion animation by Phil Tippett (Return of the Jedi, Jurassic Park). Unfortunately, in one the movie’s funniest and goriest scenes, ED-209 goes berserk during a demonstration in disarming technique and eviscerates a volunteering executive. Morton doesn’t waste a moment, jumping right over the still smoking and bloody corpse to offer up his RoboCop contingency program. “I’m sure we can have prototype ready in 90 days,” he declares.

The man who eventually becomes that first RoboCop prototype is a policeman named Alex Murphy (Peter Weller), a good-hearted family man who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. He and his partner, Anne Lewis (Nancy Allen), attempt to foil a bank heist masterminded by crime lord and gleeful cop killer Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith). Murphy and Lewis track Boddicker and his gang to an abandoned steel mill, and although Lewis escapes alive, Murphy is captured by the sadistic gang and murdered, but not after a prolonged torture sequence in which his hand is blown off and he is shot repeatedly with shotguns.

This graphically bloody sequence is a major turning point, defying all expectations and coldly putting the audience on edge for the remainder of the film. Until this moment, the tone of RoboCop had been fairly light-hearted and downright comical at times, especially during its various “media breaks,” which consistent of shallow news reports of horrible events and television commercials for artificial hearts, nuclear board games, and luxury sedans that barely get 8 miles per gallon. Murphy’s graphic death creates sympathy for the character because he dies only thirty minutes into the film after being in only a few previous scenes—hardly enough for the audience to understand him. Verhoeven also wanted the murder to serve as a kind of Christ-like crucifixion, with Murphy humiliated, tormented, and destroyed physically only to be resurrected as RoboCop. (If you think the Christ symbolism is a stretch, bear in mind that Verhoeven was a member of the controversial Jesus Seminar, a collective of scholars and laymen who researched and wrote about the historical Jesus, about whom he published a book in 2011.)

When Murphy is pronounced dead at the hospital, his body is handed over to OCP (per his police contract) to become the first RoboCop prototype. By combining the remains of his body with a massive, technological suit of body armor and computer chips, Murphy is transformed into a bullet-proof cyborg law enforcement officer. The only problem is that OCP failed to fully erase his mind, and he is left with trace memories of his now lost family and, even more importantly, the gangsters who murdered him—or who he was, or who he partially still is. In this way, RoboCop becomes a film centered on an identity crisis, with Murphy being part man and part machine, but never fully one nor the other. He is caught between two worlds: the flesh and the metal. Indeed, he is caught in the crux of other vexing situations, as well, including the dilemma between enforcing the law while existing as the creation—the product—of a corrupt private corporation that has a vested interest in his not fully doing his job.

With all the violence and action and socio-political jabs, it is too easy to overlook Peter Weller as the title character because he spends most of the film encased in a metal suit with only his jaw visible. But, like the great silent performances, his is mostly body language. When, at the end of the film, his helmet is removed and we see his face again, his sad, dour eyes elevate it to a great melodramatic moment. When we finally get to see the two halves—Murphy and RoboCop—coming together, it has a disarming, mystical quality to it.

Like many crime films, RoboCop relies a great deal on its villains, and Kurtwood Smith is instantly memorable as the maniacal Boddicker. With his receding hairline, round glasses, and sneering grin, he is evil personified in an ambitious street hoodlum. In every scene he occupies, Smith chews the scenery with psychotic glee (many of his lines were improvised during filming). His character is frightening simply because he always seems to be in such command of everything around him. He is the ringleader of Murphy’s gruesome killing, so when RoboCop gets to throw him through a number of plate-glass windows and reduce him to a sobbing mess, it is a true guilty pleasure to watch.

Of course, the other star of the film is Verhoeven, who quickly rose in the ranks after the film’s release. He solidified his position three years later with the Arnold Schwarzenegger sci-fi blockbuster Total Recall (1990), and then entered American film lore forever with the notorious erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992) and the campy NC-17-rated Showgirls (1995). However one feels about his later output, it is hard to deny that Verhoeven’s talents are on full display here, as he goes for broke in all the right ways, turning the film into a cyberpunk comic book come to life. He never allows the audience to get fully settled because the tone switches so easily from humor, to melodrama, to action, to gruesome violence. And, despite these drastically varying elements, Verhoeven manages to keep it all rolled up into a cultish sci-fi satire whose unapologetic skewering of Reagan-era corporate culture brilliantly merges the ravages of physical violence with economic and political inhumanity.

Copyright © 2022 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Arrow Films