Paul Verhoeven’s RoboCop opens on a Detroit that has already lost. Crime is up, money is gone, and the city hands its police force to a corporation. Omni Consumer Products doesn’t want to protect anyone. It wants a product. That is the joke, and Verhoeven tells it with a straight face for 102 minutes.
The Boardroom Demonstration
The film’s best early scene is a boardroom. OCP senior president Dick Jones, played by Ronny Cox, unveils ED-209, a law-enforcement robot meant to replace the police. It malfunctions and kills a volunteer in front of the executives. The violence is so outlandish it turns comic, which is the register Verhoeven chose on purpose.
The failure clears the way for Bob Morton, an ambitious junior executive played by Miguel Ferrer. Morton pitches his own project to OCP’s chairman, known only as the Old Man and played by Daniel O’Herlihy. Morton calls it RoboCop.
Murphy Dies in a Warehouse
Officer Alex Murphy, played by Peter Weller, transfers to the Metro West precinct and meets his new partner, Anne Lewis, played by Nancy Allen. They pursue crime lord Clarence Boddicker and his gang: Emil Antonowsky, Leon Nash, Joe Cox and Steve Minh. Lewis is incapacitated. The gang ambushes Murphy and tortures him. Boddicker, played by Kurtwood Smith, shoots him dead.
Morton has Murphy’s corpse converted into RoboCop, a heavily armored cyborg with no memory of his former life. The film gives him three prime directives: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law. A fourth, Directive 4, is classified. That withheld line is the plot’s engine, and the film is smart enough not to explain it early.
Peter Weller’s Chin
Casting RoboCop took six to eight months. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Ironside, Rutger Hauer, Tom Berenger, Armand Assante, Keith Carradine and James Remar were all considered. Orion favored Schwarzenegger, the star of its recent hit The Terminator, but he and others were judged too physically imposing to be believable inside the costume. The worry was that Schwarzenegger would look like the Michelin Man or the Pillsbury Doughboy. Others passed because a helmet would hide most of their face.
Producer Jon Davison said Weller was the only person who wanted the part. His low salary helped. So did his body control from martial-arts training and marathon running, and his science-fiction fan base after The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. Verhoeven said he hired him because “his chin was very good.”
Weller spent months working with mime Moni Yakim, building a fluid movement style with a stiff ending while wearing an American football uniform to approximate the finished costume. It shows. RoboCop walks like something assembled, not born.
Rob Bottin Builds the Suit
Rob Bottin led the special-effects team on practical effects, violent gore and the RoboCop costume. The film was shot between August and October 1986, mainly in Dallas, Texas, with additional filming in Las Colinas and Pittsburgh. The script was conceived by Edward Neumeier while he worked on the set of Blade Runner, then developed with Michael Miner. Producer Jon Davison bought it for Orion Pictures in early 1985.
Verhoeven dismissed the script twice. He did not understand its satirical content. His wife convinced him of its value. That is the most useful fact in the film’s production history, because the satire is the whole thing. A director who missed it twice nearly didn’t make the movie that depends on it.
Censorship boards found the violence too extreme, and several scenes were shortened or modified to get an acceptable theatrical rating. Verhoeven had pushed the gore far enough that it read as comedy. The boards cut it anyway.
Lewis Knows His Holster
RoboCop is assigned to Metro West and becomes a media favorite for a brutally efficient campaign against crime. Lewis suspects he is Murphy. She recognizes the way he holsters his gun, a trick Murphy learned to impress his son. It is a small physical detail carrying the entire emotional load, and the film earns it.
During maintenance, RoboCop dreams of Murphy’s death. He encounters Lewis, who calls him Murphy. On patrol he arrests Antonowsky, who recognizes Murphy’s mannerisms. RoboCop uses the police database to identify Antonowsky’s associates and review Murphy’s police record. He returns to Murphy’s former home, where more memory surfaces.
The film never pretends this is a mystery for the audience. We know who he is. The question is whether he does, and what he does about it.
The Man Inside the Machine
RoboCop learns of OCP’s plans and turns on his masters. That reversal is the film’s argument: the corporation built a product and the product remembered it used to be a person. Directive 4 exists to stop exactly that, and the film treats the conflict as a design flaw rather than a betrayal.
The cast around Weller is unusually deep for this kind of picture. Robert DoQui plays Sergeant Warren Reed. Felton Perry plays OCP employee Donald Johnson. Paul McCrane, Ray Wise and Jesse D. Goins play gang members. Mario Machado and Leeza Gibbons play news hosts Casey Wong and Jess Perkins, and their broadcasts are the film’s running commentary on a city selling itself.
Verhoeven cameos as a dancing nightclub patron. Davison voices ED-209. John Landis appears in an in-film advertisement.
What RoboCop Gets Right
RoboCop is a 1987 American science fiction action film with a tagline that tells you everything: “Part man, part machine, all cop.” It runs 102 minutes and it does not waste them.
What holds up is the structure. The boardroom, the warehouse, the maintenance bay and the news breaks all do the same job from different angles, showing a city where public safety is a contract and a dead officer is inventory. The violence is extreme because Verhoeven wanted it comical, and the censorship fights prove the point: the material was potent enough to be cut.
What dates is the surface. The practical effects and the suit read as 1986 workmanship, and the satire is blunt enough that Verhoeven missed it twice on the page. The film is not subtle. It is not trying to be.
The detail that matters most is Weller’s. He plays a machine with fragments of a man underneath, and the performance lives in posture and timing rather than dialogue. Verhoeven’s chin line is funnier than it deserves to be, but it is also accurate: the face is the only part of RoboCop that can register anything, and Weller uses it sparingly.
The detail that matters least is the gang. Boddicker and his crew are necessary and Kurtwood Smith is memorable, but they are obstacles, not characters. The film’s real antagonist is OCP, and the film knows it.
RoboCop sits above most 1987 action pictures because it has a thesis and commits to it. The corporation wins the contract, builds the cyborg, and loses control of it. That is not a cautionary tale about technology. It is a story about a company that treated a murdered cop as raw material and got an employee who remembered.
The Numbers
- Release year: 1987
- Director: Paul Verhoeven
- Writers: Michael Miner, Edward Neumeier
- Runtime: 102 minutes
- Genres: Action, Thriller, Science Fiction
- Tagline: “Part man, part machine, all cop.”
- Studio: Orion Pictures
- Score: 7.6 of 10
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