RoboCop (1987)

"Best way to steal money is free enterprise."

Right. The next five Saturdays will be Doctor Who nights. That means no movie reviews until after then, probably. So here's one last review slipped in while I can…

This is a very unusual film, far more so than it appears at first glance. It's an '80s macho action film with loads of posturing, gore and violence, a genre we all know well. Thing is, though, we all vaguely assume, correctly, there's something intrinsically right wing about genre. Interesting, then, that RoboCop should be so centred around a central message. Because this is a film about the excesses of privatisation. OCP has already run prisons and hospitals and now, with inevitable corruption, it runs the police. I look at this film, I look at the creeping privatisation of the police under the UK's Coalition government, and I'm scared.

Not that the film, with its vague near-future setting, is prescient in all things, of course. "Old Detroit" seems rather more populated than the Detroit of 2012. Characters are seen smoking indoors. The fashions are irredeemably '80s. But the political satire is frighteningly accurate; a privatised police force leads, inevitably to corruption. Even before we find out that Clarence Boddicker is working for Dick Jones we're clearly shown that there's a moral equivalence: that quote up there comes from Boddicker. In Old Detroit there's no public service, only profit. And no one at OCP displays and moral sense at any point whatsoever. The difference between Bob Morton and the other executives is pure hubris; they're no more moral than he is. We're given constant contrasts between the violent world of the overtly criminal and the no less disgusting world of the corporate, a world of cocaine, hookers, ruthless competition and (literally, with ED-209!) blood on the carpet. The corporate world is completely unglamorous: Wall Street this ain't. There's a good symbolic reason why we get so many scenes set in the toilet.

All this is further shown by the hilarious news broadcasts, which eerily foreshadow The Day Today but are gloriously dark, with an aggressively nuclear apartheid South Africa and the Star Wars "Peace" platform. This is also a nice narrative device for moving the plot along. RoboCop is a very pacey film. It's also a very violent, gory film, of course (especially Emil and the chemicals!!!), which is the main thing noticed by my eleven year old self when I first saw the film, hired from the local video shop. It feels a long time ago.

It's not perfect; Peter Weller's acting is not unlike a plank of wood. There's also an embarrassing plot hole: why does OCP sent RoboCop to a precinct where he might be recognised as Murphy? But it's witty, brilliantly shot by Paul Verhoeven, and gloriously violent. RoboCop is a true '80s video classic. I hadn't seen it for about twenty years, which is shocking. Don't make the mistake I did!