RoboCop (1987) Review

Official trailer

RoboCop is a better film than its premise suggests and a more subversive one than its marketing implied.

Paul Verhoeven made a corporate satire inside a violent action film, and the two tones strengthen each other instead of competing. The fake television commercials and news segments that punctuate the film are sharper social commentary than most films achieve in their entire runtime. Verhoeven was paying attention to 1980s America and put exactly what he saw on screen, just with the volume turned up to eleven.

I have a real soft spot for this one.

It’s gory and mean and the funniest action movie of its decade, and I laugh at the commercials as hard as I flinch at the shootings. My reservation is the gore. Murphy’s death has to be that ugly, and I accept it there, but elsewhere the film sometimes goes for the splatter because it can.

The Satire and the Action

Verhoeven understood something most action filmmakers don’t: satire works best when it’s delivered with a straight face.

The ED-209 boardroom demonstration is funnier because the executives react to the malfunction with crisis management instinct instead of horror. The TV commercials for nuclear war games and for a car called the 6000 SUX are funnier because they’re filmed with the earnest production values of real 1980s advertising. The news anchors presenting catastrophic stories with professional cheerfulness are funnier because they’re exactly right.

None of this announces itself as satire. It presents itself as the world, and that makes it work. A film that winks at the audience about its own cleverness dissipates the energy of the observation. RoboCop trusts the observation.

The 6000 SUX ad is my favorite joke in the movie, and the ED-209 boardroom is a close second, where a man dies in front of the board and the executives go straight into damage control. I laugh out loud at both, and then I remember how accurate they are.

The action sequences are designed with the same intelligence. Verhoeven shoots RoboCop’s violence with the clean efficiency of someone who has no illusions about what violence is. That makes it more disturbing than stylized action would be. Murphy’s death, extended, specific, almost clinical in its documentation of what gunfire does to a human body, is the most unpleasant sequence in the film and the most important. Everything RoboCop does afterward is in response to what happened in that scene.

The Prime Directive Problem

The film builds its single most efficient political argument into Murphy’s programming. He has four prime directives, the fourth of which is classified: he can’t arrest senior OCP executives. That single rule, embedded in his operating system, makes the entire film’s argument about corporate power more efficiently than any speech could.

When Murphy tries to arrest Dick Jones and physically can’t, his arm freezing, his systems overriding his will, the audience understands the entire structure of how institutional power protects itself.

The law doesn’t protect OCP’s executives. OCP owns the law. They wrote the fourth directive into the tool they built to enforce the law, so it would never be turned against them. The revelation is devastating because it was always there, visible in the structure, just waiting to be triggered.

That frozen arm is the scene that makes this an 8 for me. The arm locking up is brutal to sit through, and I’m sure Verhoeven wanted me furious. It says more about who the law serves than any speech in the film could.

Peter Weller’s Performance

Weller’s performance inside a suit that covers most of his face is a technical achievement the film doesn’t get enough credit for.

He communicates Murphy’s gradual recovery of selfhood through posture, movement, and the small visible portion of his face. The Terminator’s rigidity was designed to communicate a machine. Weller designs his movement to communicate a machine that contains a person, slightly too deliberate, slightly too efficient, but with moments where something human bleeds through.

The moment where he slowly says “Murphy,” remembering his own name for the first time, is the quiet heart of the film.

It arrives without a musical cue and without dramatic framing. Just the word, spoken slowly, by a man finding his way back to himself from inside something designed to make that impossible. I’d put that one word up against any big speech in 1980s action cinema.

Is RoboCop worth watching?

RoboCop gets its 8, and I’d call it the smartest action film of its decade. The entertainment and the argument work as one thing here, the satire comes through structure without stopping the story, and Weller finds a man inside the suit.

The fourth prime directive alone does more political work than most message movies manage in their entire runtime. It loses points with me only where the gore starts showing off.

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