RoboCop: The Thinking Man’s Action Movie

“Dead or alive, you’re coming with me.”

In 1987, director Paul Verhoeven introduced America to a modern Frankenstein, an unholy alchemy of Kevlar-coated titanium, cutting edge robotics, and bullet-riddled flesh. In Robocop, the post-flatline second act of Officer Alex Murphy offered durable street justice to a battered, demoralized urban landscape, devoid of hope and flush with illegal narcotics. Robocop patrols a broken America, where news stories wring gallows humor from international tragedy, where slapstick comedy appears the highest form of mainstream art. Human life is cheap, especially if you wear a badge, and collective bargaining does not quite apply to those deputized to combat a criminal element as militarized as they are amoral.

“I had to kill Bob Morton because he made a mistake. Now, it’s time to erase that mistake.” – Dick Jones

In 1987, Robocop was presented as a corporate solution to American failure, specifically the failure of domestic policy to address widespread unemployment, violent crime, and drug addiction in metropolitan areas. The villains of Old Detroit in this original are played by Kurtwood Smith and Ronny Cox; Smith’s cop-killing Clarence Boddicker displays a smarmy ruthlessness recognizable only to those familiar with small business owners or middle managers, while Cox’s Dick Jones, Senior Vice-President at Omni Consumer Products, personifies the Reaganomics-era corporate executive, in conservative three-piece Brooks Brothers Cox embodies the dour greed and polished vision of the Eighties’ corporate raider better than Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gekko or any of Bret Easton Ellis’ creations. This is science fiction satire, where the audience reflects on the failure of the American experiment through its interactions with street murder and sadistic research and development.