Robocop

 RoboCop

Genre: Science Fiction/Action/Dystopia

Director: Paul Verhoeven

Released: 1987


     RoboCop follows the journey of police officer Alex Murphey in a dystopic version of future Detroit where a tidal wave of crime has drowned the struggling police department and led to their being privatized under the corporate stewardship of shady company Omni Consumer Products. Murphey is brutally murdered at the hands of one of the city's most notorious gangsters, but thanks to OCP's technical wizardry (and desire to make the police department as profitable as possible), his body is quietly confiscated and resurrected as the indefatigable, borderline indestructible Robocop.

     RoboCop's first night on patrol is framed like the debut of a freshly minted superhero. He wanders the city in his car, pulling over to administer brutal justice to thugs perpetrating a variety of crimes. RoboCop's steel carapace makes him invulnerable to firearms, and his own burst fire hand canon, coupled with an unerring targeting system, ensures that this montage is never long without the crimson fountain of a blood squib and the piteous cries of another vanquished evildoer. It works for the same reason countless other "first night" sequences work in countless other comic book movies: it's a cathartic payoff after a gradual build up of character and of world.

     Like most other superhero stories, RoboCop has suffered a painful and tragic setback in his personal development that has directly led to a much-needed glowup that empowers him to fight back against a tide of criminality that has been thoroughly established before hand. (These references to comic book superheroes are not incidental, given that screenwriters Edward Neumeier and Michael Miner drew inspiration from comics whilst writing the film.)

     All of this is well and good, and at this point I was actually really enjoying RoboCop. It hadn't rushed the setup to get to the good stuff, it had established an intriguingly gritty world to explore, and the first night sequence delivered the payoff the first act had promised. The problem was that the film failed to deliver on the promise of the payoff.

     Being invincible in an action movie, RoboCop now faced a problem of diminishing returns. The novelty of an unbreakable pillar of steel and circuits casually strolling through gunfire while dispatching faceless goons with the greatest of ease would inevitably wear off to be replaced with boredom at the stakes-free inconsequentialness of it  all. By the time hardware capable of killing the iron agent of law and order was introduced, I was already getting bored with the film's action, but it had a decent mystery at its heart and the prospect of danger for the hero brought me back. Unfortunately, the writers invented a threat they clearly didn't know how to deal with, and so dealt with it in the least satisfying of ways: made those who wielded these new weapons completely incompetent. 

     No one would argue that it's no fun if the good guy only prevails through the stupidity of the bad guy. It's lazy and boring, and totally unengaging, and sadly that's exactly what happens here. The two things that are capable of felling our hero are special rifles that fire rounds capable of destroying a car in a single shot and ED-209, a glitchy, heavily armed robot with the growl of a lion and the legs of a chicken. The rifles are supplied to a criminal gang that pursues RoboCop, but they wield them like a five year old wields the plastic rifle on the hunting arcade game in a Pizza Ranch. Instead of having RoboCop adapt to this new danger, he does basically what he always does: lumber around shooting people with perfect accuracy while the thugs fire at nearby walls, I guess as warning shots to demonstrate their strong sense of fair-play. This completely neuters the film's third act action, and had me laughing in bewilderment as people somehow missed a seven foot tall cyborg waddling towards them at the pace of an arthritic tortoise. 

     ED-209 is initially better, and it slaps around RoboCop pretty well before being felled by stairs. Okay, kind of silly, but surely the rematch will deliver the action goods, right? Nope, RoboCop one-shots it and walks into the enemy headquarters to chuck a middle-aged corporate executive out a window for the climax. Thrilling stuff. 

     Supposedly you can find some redemption for all this in the movie's satire, but this I found to be surprisingly toothless. Unlike most satires, RoboCop takes itself very seriously, and the moments where it cuts to news anchors glibly talking about horrendous tragedies in between advertisements for cars that have the word "sux" in their titles just feel tonally disjointed rather than politically incisive. Even when I researched just what exactly this movie was supposed to be satirizing and learned that OCP's unnamed head officer, nicknamed The Old Man, was meant to be a caustic parody of Ronald Reagan, I was baffled. The Old Man isn't portrayed as being evil or even incompetent, he's an affable gentleman whose biggest sin seems to be blindness to what his underlings are doing, hardly a character-assassination, that's barely a character-insult. 

     All of this combines to make RoboCop feel bizarrely weak and lifeless. Its action is too safe, as are the rare moments of satire. The characters are well realized by talented actors, and the special effects are undeniably impressive, but, like I said, these are all promises that the movie doesn't make good on. These bright spots are enough to keep the film from being abysmal, but they hardly amount to the sci-fi action masterpiece I was assured of by both the film's legacy and the film itself.


C+