RoboCop Review

Verhoeven has said he read the script, threw it away, and only made the film after his wife fished it out of the bin, which is the correct origin story for a picture this contemptuous of its own genre. Everything Omni Consumer Products touches is a joke about 1987 capitalism: a police department sold off, an urban renewal plan that requires the city to fall over first, an executive who has a junior colleague murdered for winning a pitch.

Between scenes the film cuts to Media Break, a news bulletin delivered with game show brightness, and to commercials for the 6000 SUX and a family board game about nuclear war. The catchphrase is a punter on a sitcom leering that he would buy that for a dollar.

The violence is the delivery system rather than the point. Clarence Boddicker and his crew shoot Alex Murphy apart a limb at a time, and Kurtwood Smith plays Boddicker as a middle manager in glasses who has found a hobby. Verhoeven stages Murphy's death as a crucifixion on purpose and has talked about the resurrection that follows in exactly those terms. Peter Weller trained with the mime Moni Yakim to find the walk inside Rob Bottin's suit, and the small thing he does with his mouth once the helmet comes off carries the last act.

It went to the ratings board something like eight times before the X came off. The satire, the practical effects and Basil Poledouris's march have all aged better than the third act, which is ordinary shooting. A special Academy Award for sound effects editing was the only prize it got and nowhere near the measure of it.