MIDDLE-AGED MATINEE! #19 - 'RoboCop' (19987)

5/5 Stars

When I was a kid, my parents rented “RoboCop”, probably not knowing just how violent the movie was at the time. Thankfully for them, I understood at a pretty young age that movies were fictional stories and not real. Besides, the violence in “RoboCop” is more than a little over-the-top at times so it’s hard to take it too seriously.

When I originally watched the movie, I was stunned with how violent Alex Murphy’s death was and it stuck with me for many years as I did not know up to that point that a movie could be that violent. Overall, though, I ended up watching a movie that I’ve loved for decades.

Peter Weller plays the ill-fated Alex Murphy, a cop that is transformed into RoboCop by Omni Consumer Products (OCP), a mega corporation that owns the Detroit Police Department. OCP is trying to transform Old Detroit into Delta City, a clean metropolis where citizens can feel safe. But first, they have to clean up the crime on the streets and that is where RoboCop comes into the picture.

Nancy Allen and Peter Weller star as Ann Lewis and RoboCop in 'RoboCop'!

There’s only one hitch. Nancy Allen plays Anne Lewis, Alex Murphy’s former partner and she triggers a memory from when RoboCop was Alex. Soon, RoboCop begins to remember more about his former family and those who killed him, which includes a ruthless gang leader named Clarence Boddicker. This sends RoboCop on a quest to recover his humanity and on a crash course with the very company that built him.

First off, I want to talk about Weller’s stellar performance as RoboCop. When he initially took on the job, he trained for weeks on how RoboCop should move. Unfortunately, the suit Weller had to wear didn’t allow for any of his training to be used and they had to quickly go back to the drawing board to see how he could move in the new suit.

Thankfully, he created a fantastic physical performance in spite of the limitations the suit forced upon him. Also, he had to go from being a devoted cop and family man to an emotionless machine until he began to recover his memories. It’s a balancing act that not many actors can pull off but Weller knocks it out of the part.

Hey, remember that time when RoboCop shot a man in the dick?

Now let us talk about the now iconic RoboCop suit. The costume was designed by special-effects master Rob Bottin and it still looks incredible to this day. I’ve always been especially impressed with the make-up job on Weller after he takes the helmet off later in the movies.

Our primary villains for this piece are Kurtwood Smith as Clarence Boddicker and Ronny Cox as Dick Jones, a senior president at OCP who hates RoboCop because it upended his own project. A project that involved building a massive walking tank known as ED-209. Cox has always been a dependable villain, but I think this may be one of his more sinister roles.

Smith’s Boddicker is the more colorful villain, though, and I feel like he is the true villain of the movie. He is the one that killed Alex Murphy and the one that Alex wants to go after the most once he begins to remember what happened to him.

Kurtwood Smith plays the villainous Clarence Boddicker in 'RoboCop'!

The story has two major plot points. The first is the obvious one of a man who was turned into a machine and is trying to recover his identity. The second is showing a world where consumerism is running rampant with a corporation owning a police force and there are several news segments that show us that not only is Old Detroit in the gutter, but this is also a world where they sell games about nuclear warfare and cars with the shittiest gas mileage.

Sadly, this exaggerated view of unregulated capitalism and corporate greed is still relevant today. Thankfully, while “Wall Street” took a more serious look at this problem, director Paul Verhoeven takes a more satirical look at the topic.

He also does this with the violence in the movie. The action sequences are fantastic and bloody as hell. By upping the violence to a certain degree, you enjoy it but you also can’t take it too seriously. I’m sure some people in the world could and have complained about the amount of violence in this movie, but I say again that the action is well done and more satirical in nature than something to be that is meant to be looked at as real violence.

The movie was a smash when it hit theaters in ‘87 and it was an even bigger smash on home video. It spawned a franchise and while I can recommend the second film also starring Weller, I would say avoid pretty much everything else beyond that. If anything, if you love gritty dystopian sci-fi action, you can’t do much better than “RoboCop”!