ROBOCOP (1987) Dir: Paul Verhoeven

Oh man, here's my first review for nearly 3 months and it clocked in at 3 1/4 pages. I chose to review Robocop, the proper Robocop and I wrote words about it. It seemed only right being the owner of the site that i actually write something instead of letting Shawn get all the review space. Anyway's check out my review for Robocop after the jump......

"Dead or Alive you're coming with me"

With the very unnecessary remake of Robocop on the horizon, I decided to revisit the original 1987 Paul Verhoeven classic. What automatically comes to mind when I watch the original is not only it's brutal violence but also it's tongue in cheek biting satire, something Verhoeven would include again 10 years later with Starship Trooper, which coincidentally was also written by the same writer behind the original Robocop, Ed Neumeier. It's this swipe at political can consumerism that makes Robocop stand out against most late 80s sci-fi. Robocop came out 3 years after James Cameron's ground-breaking Terminator movie and while most sci-fi flicks were trying to emulate that kind of killer robot film, Neumeier and co-writer Michael Miner took the cyborg idea and flipped it, making the robot the hero. This was a genius idea, Robocop could have easily become another in a long line of low grade Terminator rip offs that included R.O.T.O.R, Eve Of Destruction and many more piss poor excuses for films (to be fair Eve OF Destruction ain't a bad film). Ultimately Robocop became a success, Paul Verhoeven went on to direct everything from Total Recall, Showgirls and the previously mentioned Starship Troopers, Neumeier directed Starship Trooper 3: Marauder and Robocop not only gained 1 but 2 sequels plus a TV Show, a Cartoon and a series of TV movies called The Prime Directives and now 26 years later, a big budget glossy lifeless remake (as you can see I'm not excited for it). But with all those additional Robocops, none have ever matched the sheer balls that the original had.

It's the near future, the city?...Detroit. Detroit is pretty much owned by Omni Consumer Products aka OCP, a massive conglomerate with their fingers in everything. They even own the police. Officer Alex Murphy is transferred to a rundown precinct in a bad area of Detroit. Cops are killed every day and it sucks the moral out of the officers. Murphy is partnered with Anne Lewis, a tough street smart female officer, on their first patrol, the encounter the Boddicker gang lead by the ruthless and down right evil Clarence Boddicker (Red Forman from That 70s Show). Tracking the gang to a disused factory, Murphy and Lewis get embroiled in a gunfight but they're out numbered. Boddicker sadistically blows off Murphy's hand with a shotgun and his men finish him off but filling him full of bullets with a final bullet to head from Boddicker. Murphy is rushed to hospital where OCP's Robocop devision (I think that's what they called it) turn him into a walking talking, gun slinging robotic law enforcer. Murphy's brain is wired into a CPU and because of this his memories are gone, lock away in his subconscious. But while out on his first patrol as a bonafide bad ass robocop, he comes across Emil, one of Boddicker's gang, attempting to hold up a gas station. This starts to unlock Murphy's memories, memories of his family and his death, leading to a confrontation with Boddicker and a conspiracy within OCP.

Let me first say that the plot is much more than what i've written up there, to completely and accurately detail the plot of the film would take many pages so my little brief should suffice for now. Robocop is a truly great slice of 80s action cinema and one of the top sci-fi flicks of that decade too, sure it lacks the industrial beauty of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner or family friendly aliens from The Last Starfighter and Flight Of The Navigator but what I does do is offer up a gritty, violent future full of social-political satire and cracking special FX from Rob Bottin and Phil Tippett. Much like James Cameron's Terminator used stop motion for the endo-skeleton T-100, Tippet used Stop motion animation for OCP's ED-209, a robotic drone, created to replace human police officer. The Animation Ed-209 is fantastic, it does look dated but it's a great big giant leap from the classic Stop motion
animation from the Ray Harryhausen era of stop motion, not that there's any thing wrong with Harryhausen's Stop motion but it shows how the form had evolved. Rob Bottin's fantastic Robocop costume has become iconic and his make-up FX for the melting Emil (Paul McCrane) just cements how incredibly talented Bottin is, but don't just take Robocop for his FX work, he was only in his early 20s when he did the practical FX in John Carpenter's The Thing only 5 years previously and for me and for most people, that film is the pinnacle of Practical FX.

If i'm correct with this, Robocop was Verhoevens second English language film after the critically panned violent medieval romp Flesh & Blood with Rutger Hauer and what a fantastic sophmore effort for the dutch helmer. His signature trade mark OTT violence is there, his digs at modern American society and the social satire that has been so prevelent in his films from Robocop through Total Recall and even Showgirls. Verhoeven does have a fantastic eye for action even if he isn't classed as an action movie director and there are definite shades of Robocop in the look and style of Total Recall. Sadly Paul Verhoeven's last English language film was 2000's Invisible man update, the Kevin Bacon starrer, Hollow Man. Hollow Man was a little underwhelming and I think it's under performance and Verhoeven's link to the critically murdered Showgirls help his hollywood decline but he did leave us with one last cracker of a sci-fi flick, Starship Troopers, a film loosely based on Robert Heinlein's epic tale of mobile infantry fight alien bugs called Arachnids. Since 2000, Verhoeven returned to his native Netherlands where he's made 3 films including the award winning WW2 film Black Book. Whether we'll see Verhoeven return to English language film making is anyone's guess but if our time with his Studio flicks is over, he had a nice run with Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct and Starship Troopers.....OK then....and Showgirls.

The casting is quite genius, Peter Weller, well known for playing Buckaroo Banzai and for starring in a film about killer rats, is wonderfully cast as Murphy, he's not a physical looking guy, he's quite gaunt and and very thin, so the opposite of an action hero, but when he's transformed from Murphy into Robocop, he takes on a whole new action hero persona. He donned the costume one more time for Robocop 2, a messy film from an epic script from Sin City creator Frank Miller, which was edited and edited until the film we saw was a complete mess. Weller passed on the Robocop suit to Robert John Burke for director Fred Dekker's (The Monster Squad) Robocop 3, again the film didn't live up to the first one and Murphy found himself relegated to a cheap TV show, some cheap TV movies and cartoon (I don't understand why they would make a cartoon for kids from a hyper violent adult movie, Troma did the same with The Toxic Crusaders) but Weller will always be officer Alex Murphy to fans.

Nancy Allen, one time wife of Scarface director Brian De Palmer, is well cast as street wise, tough female officer, Anne Lewis, who reprised her role in all three Robo flicks. Allen was cast against type as Lewis as Allen was usually cast as a hooker or a femme fatale and as Lewis she could prove she had what it took to join the ranks of the badass action heroine's of the 80s, an exclusive club whose member included Sigourney Weaver, Linda Hamilton and Cynthia Rothrock.

The evil Clarence Boddicker is played by Kurtwood Smith, primarily known as Red Forman to my generation, the strict father of Eric Forman in That 70s Show. Smith has popped up many times, usually as a military leader or a figure of upstanding authority, but as Boddicker, Smith is one evil mother fucker. He played another sadistic character in Stuart Gordon's Sci-fi Prison flick, Fortress where he played the warden of a maximum security prison but I think Clarence Boddicker will always be the most insane, sadistically evil character that Kurtwood Smith has played.

Robocop has a great support cast too that includes Miguel Ferrerer, who I've always loved as an actor in everything from Stephen King's The Stand, Deep Star Six and The Nigh Flier, Ronny Cox, the gentle, guitar playing Drew from John Boorman's Deliverance. He's played a lot of authority figures over the years from Beverly Hills Cop to playing the President in Murder At 1600. Cox reunited with Verhoeven for Total Recall where he played Coehagan, the head of Rekall who was more evil version of Robocop's Dick Jones. To be honest I thought that Ronny Cox had died but apparently he's still popping up on TV shows every now and then.

Overall, Robocop continues to gain more fans, my 26 year old brother only saw it for the first time last year and he loved it. Robocop is a strange glimpse into a near future where poverty and gang violence is ripe, and being set in Detroit kind of foreshadowed the poverty and violence that is in abundance in that city now although we are yet to create a human-cyborg hybrid police officer. I love Robocop and have done since first viewing it in the mid 90s and I revisit it quite often. It's a film a never tire off and with this re-imagining on it's way, will it ever live up to the original? I don't think so because Robocop '87 had the balls to show the things it showed, it didn't shy from violence and allowed the characters to act like adults, to swear and be badass. Robocop '14 will be stale, it will be watered down for the kids and it might even ruin the rep the original had but will I ever forget the first time I saw Peter Weller as robocop?....not in a million fucking years.